Renaissance sees continued appetite for hiring high impact technology leaders as we approach Q4
With current economic indicators pointing to a winter of price rises and interest rate hikes, the appetite for senior level hiring remains strong across the European tech sector. Recent surveys show that technology and tech leadership skills are amongst the hardest and most challenging to hire. All the more reason to partner with a search organisation that has technology leadership hiring in its DNA. Renaissance has enjoyed a successful run of CTO / VP Engineering hires over the summer months, continuing on from a strong first half year performance.
Below we have detailed some of the recent hires we have made in this critical functional area. We are grateful to the VC and PE houses that have continued to show their faith in us. None of this success would be achieved without strong collaboration between the partners and our outstanding research teams with their particular subject matter expertise.
LONDON + GERMANY
Jochen Alt
CTO
Field, the UK-based renewable energy storage company, has appointed Jochen Alt in the newly created role of CTO to lead the optimisation of its rapidly-growing storage assets.
Jochen joins from AI-driven waste management solutions provider Greyparrot.AI, where he was CTO and responsible for building the company’s computer vision waste recycling product from scratch. Prior to this he was CTO at Royal Mail, leading a team of 140 engineers. With several decades of experience in IoT, data analytics and solving complex optimisation problems, Jochen’s expertise will be invaluable to Field as it moves into its next phase of scaling renewable energy infrastructure.
In his new role at Field, Jochen will lead and grow the data and software engineering team, where he will bring to bear his extensive experience establishing, leading and scaling tech teams. He will oversee the build-out of optimisation technology that will play a key role in Field’s ambitions to overhaul the way energy assets are managed in order to maximise margins, reliability and efficiency.
The news comes off the back of a recent round of senior hires at Field and the announcement of its latest acquisition, a 20MW battery storage site in Newport, bringing its pipeline to 755MW.
For more information, please visit www.field.energy
LONDON
Peter Ennis
CTO
Sorted are a global SaaS business who provide a market leading delivery management platform, allowing both physical and digital retailers to effectively manage their delivery and returns propositions. Sorted’s technology powers dynamic checkouts, delivery management and delivery tracking around the world. The organisation has experienced high levels of growth over the past two years and have expanded their senior leadership team with the latest appointment of Peter Ennis as their new CTO. Peter has a wealth of technology expertise having spent the past four years at Amazon Web Services in their technology leadership function. He is a highly experienced leader with a strong track record of managing successful and technically excellent teams. Sorted completed their latest Series C funding round in December 2021, raising $40 million, led by Chrysalis Investments Limited and Arete Capital Partners
Carmen Carey, Sorted CEO commented “Throughout his 20+ years in the industry, Peter has combined his practical and business skills to deliver quality, scalable products and services in the most demanding of environments. This represents the next stage for Sorted as we pivot our cloud offering to support small and medium business internationally.”
For more information, please visit www.sorted.com
LONDON
Sangjune Park
Group Director of Architecture
As Cazoo continues to consolidate on its recent European expansion, the newly created position of Director of Architecture plays a key role in ensuring the delivery of operational efficiency is balanced with rolling out innovative technology solutions that delight customers. One of the key challenges is to keep pace with the speed of growth and complexity of technology in use across all areas of the Cazoo business. The Director of Architecture will lead the current architecture team to deliver a technology framework that supports growth, innovation and operational excellence. Working alongside a high performance engineering team of c.300 staff, the architecture team plays a key role in setting the standards for software engineering, defining buy or build approach as Cazoo invests in new technology across its European businesses.
Sangjune reports directly into Group CTO Jonathan Howell and joins Cazoo at a time when the business transitions from one of the fastest growing start-ups to an established and successful NYSE listed business. Sangjune brings a wealth of architecture leadership experience from largescale retail at Tesco and fintech growth at WorldRemit.
For more information, please visit www.cazoo.com
LONDON
Nick Mullen
SVP Engineering
Founded in 2016 by Femi Kuti, Opeyemi Olumekun and Matthew Mayaki, Reliance Health is on a mission to make quality healthcare accessible and affordable in countries where the dominant path to healthcare has been to pay at the point of access. Reliance Health uses technology and data science to build an integrated health system that includes affordable health insurance, telemedicine and a combination of partner and proprietary healthcare facilities. This allows them to offer innovative healthcare solutions that meet the needs of customers in emerging markets.
Nick joins Reliance from Babylon Health, where he held the role of Director of Engineering. Nick has a real passion for emerging markets and has witnessed first-hand the healthcare challenges facing consumers in these countries. Nick led the technology and product side of Babylon Health’s partnership with the Rwandan Government: ‘Babyl Rwanda’. The digitization and transformation of Rwanda’s legacy healthcare platform has made healthcare more accessible and affordable for Rwandans.
Nick has joined Reliance to provide stability, vision & technical leadership as the business expands their services internationally, ensuring that the current migration to a microservices environment is executed successfully and designing a platform and infrastructure that supports growth and scale.
For more information, please visit www.reliancehealthinc.co
AMSTERDAM
Ugur Basak
Director of Engineering, Developer Experience
TomTom is the leading independent location technology specialist, shaping mobility with highly accurate maps, navigation software, real-time traffic information and services.
To achieve their vision of a safer world, free of congestion and emissions, TomTom creates innovative technologies that keep the world moving. By combining their extensive experience with leading business and technology partners, TomTom power connected vehicles, smart mobility and ultimately, autonomous driving. Headquartered in Amsterdam with offices in 30 countries, TomTom’s technologies are trusted by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Ugur Basak joins TomTom as Director of Engineering for Developer Experience – a key role in enabling TomTom’s high performance engineering teams to be as creative and productive as they can be, in delivering leading edge technology products to keep the world moving. He joins TomTom having spent six successful years at Booking.com initially in information security and more recently in establishing platform engineering as a function that delivers tangible benefits to engineering teams across the business.
For more information, please visit www.tomtom.com
LONDON
Julien Campan
VP Engineering
Plum is a savings and investment platform that aims to effortlessly grow people’s wealth through automation. After going live in Europe, Plum is poised to launch a US stock offering, crypto and its own debit card so they can manage their finances within one app. Plum is entering a rapid scale-up phase and have appointed Julien as their VP Engineering to lead all engineering within the growth environment, to build their technology organisation to be a pan-European AI service provider. Julien joins from Funding Circle where he was Director of Engineering, Platform and Data. Plum’s co-founder and CEO is Victor Trokoudes, who was previously Head of International & Banking for Wise, and the company was launched in 2017. Plum has raised $46 million to date, with the last funding round in October 2021. Their major investors include Global Brain, EBRD and Venture Friends, as well as LendInvest’s Christian Faes, Truelayer’s CEO & co-founder Francesco Simoneschi, and ComplyAdvantage’s CEO and founder Charles Delingpole
For more information, please visit www.withplum.com
About Renaissance
Renaissance is a leading Executive Search and Leadership firm based in London and Silicon Valley, specialising in the Digital and Enterprise Technology sectors.
For nearly 20 years we have been building Board and Leadership teams for some of the most exciting start-ups and fast growth companies, mostly VC or Private Equity backed. We also work with leading corporate organisations in the technology sector, and those undergoing rapid technology or digital transformation.
