Compensation · 2025
What a Chief AI Officer actually costs in 2025
Cash, equity, and the new long-term incentive structures Fortune 500 boards are approving.
Read noteNow retained on 14 enterprise mandates⚡ Get 3 candidates in 48h
Specialist tech recruitment and executive search across Berlin, Zurich & London.
Zero to One Search is a specialist tech recruitment firm for start-ups, midcaps and enterprises. Every day we run professional and embedded search for the engineers, researchers and sales leaders who ship AI and deep tech — and, on the high-stakes mandates, the C-suite operators who lead them.
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What we search for
The roles we place, every week.
Deep, current market maps for the technical and commercial hires that move AI and deep-tech roadmaps forward — from senior ICs to the leaders who own them.
See every role we hireAI Engineers
Applied AI, LLM systems and inference infrastructure — Germany & Europe.
ML Engineers
Research-to-production ML, MLOps and platform teams.
Robotics Engineers
Perception, controls and autonomy across industrial and mobility.
Embedded Engineers
Firmware, RTOS and hardware-adjacent software teams.
Sales & GTM
Enterprise AEs, regional sales managers and technical sales leaders.
Cybersecurity Executives
CROs, VPs and Heads of Security for PE-backed and enterprise scale-ups.
Where we search
Executive search across the European tech corridor.
Berlin, Munich, Zurich and London anchor the DACH and UK tech markets. Lisbon is our nearshoring hub for engineering scale. We run mandates across the whole corridor from one team.
Berlin
AI, SaaS and deep-tech scale-ups.
Munich
Industrial AI, robotics and enterprise tech.
Zurich
DACH executive search — fintech, ML research, enterprise SaaS.
London
UK & EMEA leadership hires across AI and deep tech.
Lisbon
Nearshoring hub for engineering scale — relocation and documents support included.
Services
Three ways
we partner.
From an embedded recruiter inside your team to category-defining executive search — we shape the engagement around the outcome, not a fixed playbook.
See full service detail01Senior IC & manager
Professional Search
Targeted search for principal engineers, staff researchers, and the front-line managers who turn roadmap into shipped product — our everyday work.
02Project-based · Your team
Embedded Recruitment
A senior recruiter joins your team for 3–9 months, operating as your in-house talent partner across a single function.
03Retained · C-suite & VP
Executive Search
Conviction-led, off-market mandates for the leadership hires that define your next chapter — CTOs, Chief AI Officers, VPs and Heads of Research.
Approach
A search method built for hires the market hasn't named yet.
01Phase
Calibrate
Two weeks of immersion with founders, board, and incumbents to define the role no job spec captures.
02Phase
Map
We surface the 80–120 humans on earth who could do this. Then we narrow to the eight you should meet.
03Phase
Engage
Conviction-led outreach. We represent your mission as well as you do — because we've lived inside it.
04Phase
Close
Reference rigor, compensation architecture, and onboarding through month three. We finish what we start.
Proof
Outcomes,
not promises.
The numbers that matter to a Chair, a CHRO, and a CEO who has to live with the hire.
Read full success cases- Search completion rate
- 94%
- Median time to signed offer
- 11 wks
- Placements still in seat at 24 months
- 92%
- Combined valuation of client portfolio
- $3.4B
They mapped a market we thought we already knew. The shortlist was tighter, sharper, and more candid than anything we'd seen in a decade of search. The hire is now running a 200-person org.
Chief People Officer
Fortune 50 enterprise · AI transformation
Field notes
What we're seeing in the market.
Org design
Where the AI org should report — and why it's not the CTO
A pattern emerging across financial services, healthcare, and industrial enterprises.
Read noteTalent flow
The frontier-lab to enterprise migration is accelerating
Why principal researchers are leaving labs for enterprise mandates with real deployment surface.
Read notePortugal
Relocating to Portugal? We handle the paperwork.
Visa, NIF, NISS, housing, bank account and tax orientation — bundled with retained search at no extra fee. One timeline, one partner, zero friction.
For senior leaders & operators
Building in AI or deep tech?
Let's keep in touch.
Most of the people we place never applied to a role — they had a conversation. Confidential by default, long-horizon, and on your side of the table.
Accepting Q3 mandates
Get 3 candidates
in 48 hours.
Send us the brief — we respond within one business day with a shortlist of three vetted candidates inside 48 hours. Confidential by default.