The engineering-director search had gone from paused to everywhere.
In September, I had held off on hiring one director and decided Reonomy needed team leads first. By early December, the leadership search was active again. Referrals were arriving, recruiters were sending possibilities, and I was reaching through common connections to people I thought could fit.
The job was difficult to explain in a template.
Reonomy was building technology for commercial real estate, a huge capital market that still had very little modern software. Somebody with experience around financial products could understand why that mattered, but we were not trying to build a financial firm. The leader also had to understand product, data, engineering, and the odd pace of a small company.
Some people were not looking. Some were interested but away for the holidays. A few moved from an introductory call to a face-to-face conversation. I kept asking for numbers, finding times, and arranging breakfasts or coffee near the office.
The title could move for the right person. The work mattered more. We needed senior engineering leadership that fit the organization we were becoming, not somebody who simply wanted the biggest title available.
I used my own network heavily. If I had worked with strong people from the same company or somebody came through a trusted connection, I said so. That gave us a reason to talk, not a reason to skip the evaluation.
The search did not end that week. Calls and meetings were already spilling into the new year. For now, the director role was no longer sitting in a draft. It was back in my calendar, one conversation at a time.