Executive recruitment for consumer brands
CTO Executive Search
for DTC and Consumer Brands
Most CTO searches borrow the job description from a software company.
We define what the seat owns at your brand first, then introduce technology leaders who have run a commerce stack through peak season at consumer brands
from $25M to $500M+.
First interviews in 10 business days. Retained search.
Successful placements at top ecommerce and consumer brands
CTO vs. CIO vs. VP of Engineering vs. Head of Ecommerce
These titles get used interchangeably, and at a consumer brand they lead to very different hires. What separates them is who owns the platform under the storefront, and who owns what sells on it.
Get it wrong and the search fails in one of two ways. You hire a VP of engineering when you needed someone to own the stack, the vendors, and the tech budget. Or you hire a CTO when you needed someone to ship the roadmap your head of ecommerce already wrote.
We settle the scope on the intake call, before we contact any candidates.
Why CTO searches stall at consumer brands
CTO searches at consumer brands usually stall because the title comes from software companies,
and nobody writes down what the seat owns at a brand that ships physical product.
Six problems come up most often.
Software pedigree, no commerce stack
The candidate scaled a product in the technology sector and talks fluently about release cadence and microservices. They have never kept a storefront, an ERP, and a 3PL in sync through Black Friday.
A developer job at a CTO title
The job description asks for strategy, but year one is theme fixes, app maintenance, and agency tickets. You pay C-suite salary for senior developer work, or the CTO leaves once they see it.
CTO and head of ecommerce collide
Nobody decided who owns the theme and the testing roadmap. Each leader waits on the other, and the site stops moving.
The agency owns the stack
Your code and your integrations sit with an outside dev shop. Without engineers under the seat, year one goes to hiring a team and taking the work back.
Hired for the replatform only
Brands often open a CTO search a quarter before a migration or an ERP rollout. The leader who runs a strong cutover can be the wrong operator for the three years after go-live.
Benchmarked against the wrong market
Founders anchor on enterprise CTO pay or SaaS equity packages. They then overpay for the wrong profile, or screen out every commerce technologist worth talking to.
According to Gartner, more than 70% of recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original business goals by 2027. At a consumer brand, the CTO usually signs off on that ERP, then has to make it talk to Shopify, the 3PL, and finance. Ask every CTO candidate how their last ERP rollout went before you ask anything else.
First interviews in 10 business days. Retained model.
Which technology leadership tier does your brand need?
Revenue stage, the team the hire inherits, and what they answer for tell you more than the title does.
Full-time or fractional CTO?
Fractional works when the stack is stable, an agency or a small team ships the work, and the decisions that need a senior technologist come up a few times a quarter. That usually means under $40M in revenue and no migration on the calendar.
Go full-time when you are carrying in-house engineers, when a replatform or ERP project is within 12 months, or when peak season revenue is large enough that an outage costs more than the salary. Shopify merchants did a record $14.6 billion in sales over BFCM 2025, with sales peaking at $5.1 million per minute on Black Friday. If that weekend carries a real share of your year, someone needs to own the plan for it all year.
Many brands run a fractional CTO through the platform decision,
then hire the full-time seat against the architecture it produced.
What a great DTC CTO looks like
At a consumer brand, the CTO's job is the stack the business runs on and the team that keeps it running. Technical depth gets a candidate into the room. We vet for the commerce record first and the title history second.
What separates a good CTO from a great one at a consumer brand
Vertically integrated or supplier-led:
which CFO fits your supply model
Whether your storefront runs on Shopify's own themes or on a custom front end changes the CTO job more than revenue does. A CTO who has only worked in one model will misjudge the other's costs in the first quarter.
We confirm your stack on the intake call and screen for the model you run, or the one you are moving to. If a replatform is on the table, compare the enterprise ecommerce platforms before you write the CTO brief.
How a CTO strengthens the team you already have
A strong CTO changes what the people around them can ask for.
Your head of ecommerce stops waiting on tickets
Tests ship on a release schedule instead of competing with an agency backlog.
Operations stops reconciling by hand
Orders and inventory match across Shopify, the ERP, and the 3PL, so your COO works from one number.
Finance and marketing work from the same data
Attribution and customer data land in one warehouse, so your CFO and CMO argue about strategy instead of whose dashboard is right.
What a CTO costs at a DTC or CPG brand
Most published CTO salary data describes software companies and the Fortune 500.
For a $150M consumer brand, it points you at the wrong number.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics groups chief technology officers with computer and information systems managers, alongside CIOs and IT directors. That group earned a $175,140 median in May 2025, with the lowest 10 percent below $107,550 and the highest 10 percent above $297,510. Industry moves the number: the median was $200,510 in the information sector and $178,110 in manufacturing.
At the other end, Heidrick & Struggles' 2024 survey of digital and technology officers, mostly CIOs and CTOs at companies above $1 billion in revenue, put self-reported average 2023 base pay for US respondents at $513,000 and average total compensation, including bonus and equity, at $1,586,600. Respondents at consumer companies averaged $439,000 in base and $1.44 million in total. A consumer brand CTO with a real platform and team mandate lands between the BLS median and that consumer-company average.
Geography splits this market in two.
For a CTO search, the 90th percentile column is the one that matters. At that level, San Francisco pays $101,780 more than Salt Lake City, and Seattle nearly matches San Francisco. Medians tell a similar story: San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Denver run 16% to 33% above the national median, and the other seven sit within 8% of it either way. A brand in Dallas or Atlanta hiring a CTO out of the Bay Area should budget for that gap, and a remote search puts more candidates in range. On a call, we share how base, bonus, and equity are split for consumer brand technology leaders at your stage.
Our CTO executive search process
1 Client Intake Call
Our recruitment process starts with a structured intake that scopes the role before sourcing begins. First we settle which version of the seat you need: a lead engineer who ships the work, a VP of engineering who owns the roadmap and the team, a CTO who owns the platform and the tech budget or a transformation CTO hired against a defined rebuild.
Then we get specific about what transfers with the title. Vendor contracts, app approvals, the tech budget, and hiring rights either move to this hire or stay with you and your CMO. The search changes completely depending on which.
We map your setup: revenue stage, platform and front end, ERP and 3PL, the agencies and engineers already in place, your channel mix, and the projects on the next 18 months of the roadmap. You bring the business context. We write the executive hiring profile around it before we contact a single candidate.
2 First Interviews in 10 Days
Within 10 business days, you're interviewing senior technology leaders screened against the brief we agreed on. We evaluate CTO candidates on the systems they owned at a consumer brand near your stage: the replatforms they led, the peak seasons they ran, and the engineering teams they built. We test leadership capability alongside technical depth, because the CTO role at a brand is as much vendor and budget management as it is architecture.
We prioritize technology leaders who have run a storefront with real traffic in front of it and an ERP behind it. A track record in the technology sector alone rarely carries over. We source through our executive network, which is how we reach sitting CTOs and VPs of engineering at DTC and CPG brands who aren't looking.
3 Weekly Refinement
Executive searches move as your read on the role sharpens. You get a shared portal for candidates, feedback, and interview stages, plus a weekly call to recalibrate.
Each week we tighten the profile based on what the interviews surfaced. Founders often discover in interview three that they scoped the role one tier too high or too low. It tends to come out when a candidate asks who approves new apps and nobody has a clear answer. Catching that in week two costs far less than catching it after an offer.
4 White-Glove Talent Solutions
We schedule interviews across your leadership team and run structured reference checks with former direct reports as well as former bosses. Those direct-report calls show how the candidate leads engineers when nobody senior is watching. The leadership assessment uses your own business problems: the candidate works through your current stack map and what went wrong last peak season.
We run compensation negotiation as an intermediary, including the equity conversation, so you and your incoming CTO never haggle directly in the final week. We stay involved through onboarding so the hire ramps into the engineering team and your agencies instead of around them.
Executive search case studies
Why consumer brands choose Constant Hire for CTO recruitment
DTC, ecommerce, and CPG only
Consumer brands are our entire client list. Generalist technology recruiting firms fit consumer searches in around SaaS, fintech, and healthcare.
Consumer brand technology depth
Our recruiting team works with 7-, 8-, and 9-figure consumer brands. We know the difference between a CTO who kept Shopify Plus and an ERP in sync through Black Friday and an engineering leader who has only shipped software.
A personal network of sitting technology leaders
We know sitting CTOs and VPs of engineering across DTC and CPG personally. Founders come to us for introductions they cannot make themselves.
Shortlist in 10 business days
We present a vetted shortlist within 10 business days of kickoff. Most placements close within 45 to 60 days. Generalist firms typically take 90 to 120 days.
How Constant Hire compares to other CTO search options
Founders usually weigh three alternatives: a technology executive search firm, a large generalist firm like Egon Zehnder or Korn Ferry, or an in-house talent acquisition team stretched across every function. But they hire an executive search firm for access. The CTO you need is employed somewhere, outside your network, and not answering recruiter InMail. Our network includes 1,000+ senior consumer brand operators, including sitting CTOs and VPs of engineering.
What DTC experts are saying about us.
If you're looking for a bad ass recruiter for roles like Head of Growth, Director of Performance Creative, Ops, he's your guy.
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What does a CTO executive search firm do?
A CTO executive search firm is a retained search partner that helps companies hire a chief technology officer by sourcing and vetting employed technology leaders who aren't applying to roles. A specialist firm also scopes the mandate first, deciding what the CTO owns and which decisions stay with the founder, the CMO, or the head of ecommerce.
When should a DTC or CPG brand hire a CTO?
Usually past $100M in revenue, or earlier when in-house engineers, a replatform, or an ERP rollout need one owner. The clearest trigger is technology decisions getting made by whichever team pays for the tool. Below $100M, a VP of engineering usually fits better, and below $25M a lead engineer paired with a fractional CTO does.
Is a CTO a C-suite executive?
Yes. A CTO sits in the C-suite alongside the CFO, COO, and CMO, and usually reports to the CEO. At a consumer brand, the CTO owns the platform, the integrations, the tech budget, and the engineering leaders who run them. How senior the seat is in practice depends on whether those decisions actually move to it.
Is a CTO higher than a VP of engineering?
Yes. A CTO owns the technology strategy, the vendor relationships, and the budget. A VP of engineering owns delivery and the engineering team, and usually reports to the CTO or the founder. Many consumer brands hire a VP of engineering first and add the CTO seat past $100M in revenue.
What is the difference between a CIO and a CTO?
A chief information officer runs internal systems: devices, access, back-office software, and often the ERP. A CTO owns the technology customers touch and the platform underneath it. At most consumer brands under $250M, one leader covers both, usually with the CTO title.
What is a typical CTO salary at a consumer brand?
BLS data for May 2025 puts computer and information systems managers, the group that includes CTOs, at a $175,140 national median and $297,510 at the 90th percentile, rising to $335,770 at the 90th percentile in San Francisco. Heidrick & Struggles' 2024 survey of large-company technology officers put average US base pay at $513,000, or $439,000 at consumer companies. A consumer brand CTO sits between the two.
Should we hire a full-time, interim, or fractional CTO?
Full-time when you carry in-house engineers or a replatform is within a year. Interim when a CTO leaves mid-migration or ahead of peak season. Fractional when the stack is stable, an agency ships the work, and you need senior judgment a few days a month, typically under $40M in revenue.
Does a consumer brand need a separate CISO or chief AI officer?
Rarely below $500M in revenue. Most consumer brands fold the chief information security officer role and AI work into the CTO seat. Heidrick & Struggles' 2025 CISO survey found 42% of CISOs now report directly to the CEO, but those respondents mostly work at large enterprises. At a brand, CISOs and AI leads usually report to the CTO.
What should I look for in a CTO candidate during an executive search?
Look for a technology leader who has run a commerce platform through peak season, owned the integrations between the storefront, the ERP, and the 3PL, and built an engineering team that ships without them. Ask what they decided not to build last year. A strong record in software alone rarely transfers to a brand mandate.
Let's find the CTO
your brand needs to scale
then put technology leaders on your calendar within 10 business days.
15-30 minutes • No Obligation • First interviews in 10 business days • Retained model