Pat Poels SVP Engineering, Snyk
Previously
CTO, EventbriteCTO, Pathways Platform
Company
Snyk is an Accel, Google Ventures and Stripes backed Security SaaS brand that finds and fixes opensource code vulnerabilities for developers.
Search Background
On the back of us delivering the Chief People Officer, Dipti Salopek and then Snyk raising $150m Series C led by Stripes Group, we were asked to search for their SVP Engineering. With a collocated engineering, data science and security research team of over 100 split between London and Tel Aviv and a company doubling in size every 6 months, the expectation is that engineering would likely scale to 300+ in the build up to IPO.
Requirements
Snyk sought a ‘town planner’ SVP Engineering. Someone who had scaled a multi-site, multi-geography engineering organisation to multiple hundreds, who understood their product obsessed culture and understood how to balance scale without compromising on innovation and speed of delivery. So few ‘grounds up SaaS’ brands have scaled to IPO in Europe that we deployed a global strategy for research, building our execution team across London and San Francisco offices.
Result
After building a shortlist of 3 US and 2 European candidates, Snyk eventually selected Pat Poels who had built the original core of Ticketmaster and then spent the past 8 years scaling Eventbrite through to IPO as SVP Engineering and CTO.
Dipti Salopek
VP People
We knew at the outset that we had a complicated search. A new head of Engineering who had leadership experience, scale-up experience, domain expertise, international agility and would be willing to relocate to London. Erevena, with their presence in both Europe and the US, was an incredible partner on the search. They were careful to set expectations from the onset, but then very quickly found candidates that exceeded our expectations on all fronts. We closed the search in an unbelievably quick two months, but even more than the speed, we appreciated the thoughtful partnership. Sam truly understood our business, our priorities, and felt very much like an extension of our team. Having used Erevena twice already for different searches, we would have no hesitation on partnering with them again in the future as our business continues to evolve and grow.
