Group CTO for a Lahore-headquartered Series-C consumer fintech

The client had reached a 180-person headcount and was running an engineering organisation of 38 across three sub-teams (consumer, merchant, platform). The founding CTO had taken the company from 4 engineers to that scale and had been clear with the board for nine months that he was ready to step into a hands-off chairman-style role.

The board had spent four months running an internal-then-contingent search through two contingent agencies. The shortlist that came back was a mix of UAE-based principal engineers and a few Pakistan-based engineering directors with backgrounds that read more like enterprise IT than venture-scale technology leadership.

The Group CFO, who chaired the hiring committee, called Caliber on a Wednesday afternoon in March 2024. We had an initial brief by Friday and a retainer agreement signed on the following Monday.

We spent the first ten days re-running the brief from scratch. The original brief read like a CTO job description copied from a US-headquartered Series C — it asked for hyperscaler experience the company would never benefit from. We rebuilt the brief around two non-negotiables: prior experience leading a regulator-graded engineering organisation through a Series-D-equivalent scaling, and a track record of inheriting and respecting an engineering culture rather than dismantling and re-founding it.

On that revised brief, the available pool became much smaller and much more identifiable. We mapped 41 candidates across Pakistan, the GCC, Singapore, and the UK. Of those 41, 18 were known to us already through prior engagements; 23 we approached cold via direct LinkedIn message and a follow-up scheduled call.

After three weeks of conversations we had a long list of 14, of which 11 agreed to a first-round with the hiring committee. We presented a shortlist of 5 in week 6. By week 9 the committee had completed second-round conversations with 4 of the 5. The fifth dropped out at second-round stage citing a pending offer in Singapore — a dropout we had flagged as likely in week 4 reference work.

We ran written reference checks (5 references per finalist, including one investor reference where applicable) in parallel with offer-shape negotiations. The successful candidate accepted in week 11.

The placed candidate is a Karachi-domiciled engineering leader who had spent six years inside a UAE consumer-fintech scale-up and four years before that at a US-headquartered payments company. She was approached cold in week 2.

Eight months in, the team has shipped one regulator-graded re-platforming, hired two engineering directors (both placed by us as a follow-on engagement), and the company has filed paperwork for its Series D.

The CFO has been the single most active source of inbound referrals to Caliber's Lahore desk in the eighteen months since.