KORE1 executive search in Austin, as of November 2026
Executive Search Firm in Austin Retained and engaged search for C-suite, VP and director hires
CTO, VP Engineering, VP Manufacturing, CFO and director searches for employers in Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown and Taylor.
KORE1 runs retained and engaged executive search for Austin employers hiring a CTO, VP Engineering, VP Manufacturing or CFO. While a CTO seat is open, a senior contract software engineer in Austin bills a median $129 an hour.
Last updated: November 10, 2026
- This page
- Permanent C-suite, VP and director searches for Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown and Taylor employers, the Texas noncompete rules that shape the offer, and what contract cover costs while the search runs.
- Not this page
- A national search, or one outside Central Texas, starts with KORE1 executive search services.
Austin hires its leaders in very different rooms. A SaaS company on the north side replaces its CTO. A plant in Taylor adds a VP of manufacturing before the line ramps. A growth-stage founder needs a CFO before the next raise. All of them want people who already have good jobs and no reason to leave, which means the best candidates never browse a job board and usually hear about an opening from someone they’ve known for years. For a seat in Florida, where funds and Latin America headquarters set the pool, see our Miami executive searches.
So we go to them. Retained when the seat is confidential, engaged when the pool is easier to see. The steps are the ones our executive recruiting firm runs everywhere, including our searches in Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, so a board that has watched one of our searches in another city will recognize the rhythm here, and what Texas adds is a noncompete test that we raise on the very first call. Georgia asks a different question, who the employee is as well as how long the restraint runs, and executive search firms in Atlanta raise it on the first call too. Dallas-Fort Worth runs the same steps with relocated headquarters in place of chip plants, as Dallas executive search under Texas law explains. The same first-call habit works in California, where the noncompete is void, as executive search firms in San Francisco explain.
Which Leaders Are Austin’s Chip, Software and Manufacturing Employers Hiring?
Travis and Williamson counties held 1,173,070 covered jobs in 2025. Here are the five sectors that matter most to a leadership search, by employment.
Four kinds of employer bring us most of the leadership work here. The last one comes from the capital itself.
Enterprise software and SaaS
CTO and VP Engineering
Professional and technical services is the biggest sector on the ledger. Engineering leaders are the seats those jobs report up to.
Semiconductors and plants
VP Manufacturing, fab operations, quality
Manufacturing holds 76,691 jobs, and 29,560 of them make computer and electronic products. Those plants want someone who has ramped a line before.
Growth-stage companies
CFO
Closing the books and raising the next round are one job at a fast-growing company. That’s where interim cover helps most.
Vendors to state agencies
Directors and VPs
Austin is the state capital, and state government alone accounts for 66,812 jobs here. Vendors to those agencies hire directors who know how procurement works.
Chip hiring isn’t only talk. The NIST CHIPS page for Samsung Electronics in Texas lists an award to Samsung Austin Semiconductor that covers two leading-edge fabs and an R&D fab in Taylor, plus an expansion of its existing Austin facility. That page is a public award record, not a KORE1 client list, and a plant ramping in that corridor still competes for the same small group of people who have run a fab ramp before, whatever the award says about future jobs.
Our CTO search, CFO search and VP finance search work the same in Austin as anywhere else. Then the second hire shows up. A CTO who starts in March usually wants a VP Engineering they picked by summer, and a new CFO will want a controller they trust, so it pays to scope both seats on one call instead of two separate ones.
Will a Texas Noncompete Hold When Your Austin Executive Search Targets a Rival’s VP?
It depends on the agreement, and employment counsel reads it. Texas gives counsel three dimensions to measure on any finalist’s noncompete, and a recruiter’s job is to get the paper in front of them early.
Time
- Go end
- A restricted period that’s reasonable for the interest being protected.
- No-go end
- A period that runs longer than protecting that interest requires.
- Ask each finalist for
- The restricted period as written, in months, from every signed agreement.
Geographic area
- Go end
- An area that’s reasonable for that same interest.
- No-go end
- An area wider than the protection needs.
- Ask each finalist for
- The territory as written, whether that’s a radius, a named region or the whole state.
Scope of activity
- Go end
- Restrained work that’s reasonable for that interest.
- No-go end
- A list of restrained work longer than protecting the interest requires.
- Ask each finalist for
- The restrained activities word for word, plus how the agreement defines a competitor.
Check this first The covenant has to be ancillary to or part of an otherwise enforceable agreement at the time that agreement is made. The gauges only matter after it passes that check.
Here’s the practical part. By the second interview, ask each finalist for every signed agreement that restrains them, and not only the offer letter from the rival. Noncompetes also sit in equity grants, bonus plans and old separation agreements, so send the whole stack to your employment counsel before an offer goes out and not the week the candidate is asked to sign.
We ask that early on purpose. A clause found the week a candidate resigns costs the company a month, and sometimes the candidate, while the same clause found at the second interview costs a phone call. Counsel decides what the clause means. We don’t guess.
Hiring a Physician Executive or Clinical Leader in Austin? SB 1318 Changed the Rules
For physicians, Texas stopped leaving the numbers open. S.B. 1318 took effect September 1, 2025, and these three sizes are fixed.
1 year
Time
The covenant expires no later than the one-year anniversary of the date the contract or employment ends.
5 miles
Geographic area
The area is no more than a five-mile radius from where the physician primarily practiced before the contract or employment ended.
Annual pay
Buyout cap
The physician can buy out of the covenant for no more than their total annual salary and wages at termination.
Two catches matter on a search. Subsection (b-1) says the practice of medicine, for these limits, doesn’t include managing or directing medical services in an administrative capacity for a practice or other health care provider, so whether a medical director or CMO seat counts is a question for counsel, not for us.
The change also reaches only covenants entered into or renewed on or after September 1, 2025, which means a physician’s older covenant runs under the law in place when it was signed. Subsection (d) separately voids a physician covenant when the physician is let go without good cause.
How Do You Sell an Austin Seat to a Leader in California or New York?
Lead with the job. A leader at a coastal company wants to know what they’ll own, who they report to and what the board has already funded. Austin comes after that.
Then the place. Texas has no state income tax, as the Texas Comptroller’s Fiscal Notes put it in December 2025. That’s one argument among several, and we use it that way. We don’t put a savings figure on it, because we don’t know a candidate’s equity, housing or family situation, and the franchise tax is a business tax, so we never call Texas tax-free for the employer.
Posting the job is its own question. A March 2026 Seyfarth compendium of state pay transparency laws lists no Texas law, but it does list California, Colorado, New York and Washington, so a posting that a remote hire could answer from one of those states deserves a look from counsel before it goes live. For an Ohio seat, the city of Cincinnati goes further and bars the salary-history question, as laid out in our Cincinnati executive searches.
What Should an Austin Board Settle Before a Retained Executive Search Starts?
Five things. Boards that haven’t decided them tend to spend the first month deciding them with a search firm on the clock, which is an expensive way to hold a meeting nobody scheduled.
- Reporting line
Who the leader reports to, and whether anyone reports to them on day one.
- Equity band
The range of equity the board will approve, set before the first finalist asks about it.
- Approved range
The salary range the company has signed off on, so no offer waits on a second approval.
- Decision panel
The few people who decide, and who can say no.
- Funded initiative
The project the new leader owns, with real money and an executive sponsor behind it. Devin Hornick, a Partner at KORE1, starts there when a company says hiring budgets are tight.
“What projects have executive sponsorship even though hiring budgets are tight?”
Retained or engaged? Retained fits a seat nobody can know about yet, such as replacing a sitting CTO. Engaged fits a VP or director seat where the pool is easier to see. Our guide on how to choose an executive search firm covers the trade-off, and the C-suite hiring guide is the longer read, while the engagement letter carries our fee terms, so we don’t quote them on a web page.
Start an Austin leadership search
Tell us the seat, the stage of the company, the funded initiative the leader owns, whether finalists may carry a Texas noncompete and your target start.
Who Leads Engineering While the Austin CTO or VP Engineering Seat Is Open?
Acting leadership cover in Austin, as of October 16, 2026. All three rows are modeled cells in the KORE1 Contract Rate Index, billed by the hour. None of them is executive pay.
| Acting seat | Covers | Bill range | Median | 3 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software engineer, senior | Technical lead while the CTO or VP Engineering seat is open | $116 to $139 | $129 | $67,000 |
| Mechanical, electrical or manufacturing engineer, senior | A line or fab ramp that can’t wait for a VP Manufacturing | $98 to $122 | $113 | $58,600 |
| Controller, senior | The close, until a CFO lands | $145 to $177 | $164 | $85,300 |
Read the table for what it is. The index has no CTO or VP cell, so these rows price the work under the empty seat and say nothing about what a search costs, which makes this cover and not a salary. A senior contract software engineer acting as technical lead bills a median $129 an hour, about $67,000 for three months, and the roadmap keeps moving while the board meets finalists.
The full table, every level of every IT role we price in the metro, lives on Austin IT contractor rates. Our CTO staffing page covers the permanent seat.
Price acting engineering cover
Tell us the seat that’s empty, the work that can’t wait and your start date. We’ll price each contract seat.
Can the Austin Contract Lead Stay On After the New CTO Starts?
Often, yes. The contractor who carried the roadmap knows where every dependency lives. A new CTO tends to notice.
Here’s how that works with us. After 1,040 hours on assignment, 26 weeks at 40 hours, a KORE1 contractor can move to your payroll with no conversion fee, and they start fast too, since across 1,997 contract placements our median from offer to start was 3 days.
Devin Hornick describes contract cover the way clients use it. It’s quick to get, it’s flexible, and you scale it up or down as the search runs. If the seat takes a quarter to fill, that’s a quarter of product work that kept moving instead of waiting politely in a backlog for somebody new to arrive.
$129
median hourly bill rate, senior contract software engineer in Austin, modeled
1,173,070
covered jobs in Travis and Williamson counties, 2025 annual average
3 days
median from offer to start for KORE1 contractors (n=1,997)
1,040 hours
on assignment before a KORE1 contractor can convert with no fee
Rates from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, effective October 16, 2026. Jobs from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Placement figures from KORE1 W2 contract records, all roles. Track record, not a commitment.
Common Questions
What Austin founders and boards ask about a leadership search.
Does Texas require a pay range in an executive job posting?
No, we found no Texas statute that requires a pay range in a job posting. The March 2026 Seyfarth compendium of state pay transparency laws lists no Texas law, though it does list California, Colorado, New York and Washington, so ask counsel before a posting that a remote hire could answer from one of those states goes live.
Can the search cover Round Rock, Georgetown and Taylor?
Yes, searches cover Austin, Round Rock, Georgetown, Taylor and the rest of Travis and Williamson counties. KORE1 serves the area without a local office.
How fast can contract cover start while the search runs?
The median from offer to start is 3 days, across 1,997 KORE1 contract placements. That’s a track record for all roles, not a promise for one Austin seat, because a real start date depends on the role, the candidate and how quickly your own team can approve and onboard a contractor.
What does a senior contract software engineer cost in Austin?
A senior contract software engineer in Austin bills $116 to $139 an hour, median $129, about $67,000 for three months at 40 hours a week. That’s a modeled cell in the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, a contract bill rate and not executive pay.
Will a Texas noncompete stop us from hiring a leader from a competitor?
It might, and employment counsel decides. Section 15.50(a) makes a noncompete enforceable only when it’s ancillary to an otherwise enforceable agreement and reasonable in time, geographic area and scope of activity. Get each finalist’s signed agreements by the second interview.
Do Texas’s new physician noncompete limits apply to a hospital CMO?
It depends on the seat, and counsel decides. For the new limits, the statute says the practice of medicine doesn’t include managing or directing medical services in an administrative capacity for a practice or other health care provider, so a medical director or CMO role is worth a read against that language.
Start an Austin Leadership Search
Send us five things. A recruiter will come back with how we’d run the search.
- The seatCTO, VP Engineering, VP Manufacturing, CFO or a director seat.
- The stageVenture-backed, PE-owned, public or a plant operation.
- The initiativeThe funded project the new leader owns.
- The noncompeteWhether finalists may carry a Texas noncompete.
- The startWhen the new leader has to be in the seat.
Want to see the process first? Read how KORE1 runs a retained search. Need cover now? Price contract cover, see the rest of the Austin rate set, or call 949-706-6990.
