Per-MW pricing, regional variance, and cost drivers for owners scoping hyperscale & AI builds.
Salary benchmarks across the 14 mission-critical disciplines.
Confidential retained search for biotech and pharma leadership, with our edge where mandates are hardest: cGMP capital projects — the executives who deliver biomanufacturing campuses, fill-finish lines, and CDMO capacity. The leadership tier of a practice that spans project engineer to executive.
iRecruit.co runs life sciences executive search as the leadership tier of its construction executive search practice: confidential retained mandates at 30% of first-year compensation, every candidate assessed on facilities delivered, not title history.
Typical VP and director cadence; C-suite mandates scoped individually.
Biotech and pharma C-suite and VP searches land here — but the center of gravity is capacity. cGMP capital projects executives are a market of a few hundred operators — the market we know best:
Capital projects, process engineering, automation, and the EPCM relationships that deliver them.
Portfolio governance, stage gates, TIC accountability from FEL through CQV handover.
P&L and license-holder accountability for a plant — and the expansions that keep it competitive.
Mechanical completion to licensed production: commissioning, qualification, validation master plans.
Quality systems for new capacity: PAI readiness, batch record architecture, a QA org that scales.
Clean and black utilities, cGMP facility operations, shutdown planning, capital renewal.
SVP Technical Operations and CTOO mandates — process development into licensed capacity.
The same practice places project engineers through directors across biotech and pharma builds — one bar, the full span.
Four stages, principal-led, disclosure rules set before anyone is approached — most mandates are replacements or pre-announcement expansions the market cannot hear about first.
A working session with the hiring executive or board: success profile, compensation architecture, and the disclosure rules — who can know, and when. Signed off before any approach.
We name the executives who have delivered comparable scope — CDMO build-outs, big-pharma capital programs, owner-side engineering orgs — and approach blind until mutual interest is real.
A calibrated slate in 2–3 weeks, scored against the success profile. We run scheduling, briefings, and structured debriefs — confidentiality held on both sides.
Offer structuring against live market data, board-level finalist references, resignation and counteroffer handling through the notice period, a transition plan to day one.
Generalist biotech search speaks pipeline; capacity mandates speak CQV, tech transfer, and TIC. Our network is built around biotech construction leadership — and searches run beside the live delivery mandates on our life sciences construction tracker:
An executive claiming a facility gets asked how it was qualified — CQV strategy, validation approach, what the PAI found. Fluency exposes adjacency in one call.
FEL stages, EPCM models, TIC governance, schedule risk on long-lead equipment — we assess executives in the language their boards hold them to.
Sourcing runs through ISPE circles, CDMO expansion teams, and owner-side capital orgs — where these executives are, not where resumes accumulate.
Leaders are assessed on transfers landed — scale-up, comparability, PPQ — because a campus only counts when the process runs in it.
Industry-wide, retained search runs 25–35% of first-year compensation. iRecruit.co retained search is 30% of first-year compensation, scoped and confirmed in writing before the search launches, with milestones and guarantee terms set in the engagement letter. Retained means the mandate is exclusive and resourced — dedicated research, a named field, principal-led approaches — not a contingent resume race.
Broadly: C-suite and VP mandates across biotech and pharma — CEO, COO, CSO, CFO, the commercial suite. iRecruit.co’s center of gravity is the leadership that delivers capacity: VP of Engineering, VP or Director of Capital Projects, Site Head / GM of biomanufacturing, Director of CQV, VP of Quality, Director of Facilities & Utilities, and CDO-adjacent technical operations mandates like SVP Technical Operations.
General biotech search assesses executives in pipeline language — IND filings, clinical milestones, launches. Capital-projects search assesses them on assets: cGMP suites taken through CQV, PPQ campaigns run, tech transfers landed, capital programs governed to TIC and schedule. Capacity leaders also cluster in different networks — ISPE circles, CDMO expansion teams, owner-side capital orgs. When the mandate is building capacity, construction fluency separates a plausible slate from a deliverable one.
A 30-minute conversation about the mandate — role, context, compensation architecture, timeline. Scope and pricing in writing; discretion from the first call.
iRecruit.co places project engineers through executives across life sciences and every mission-critical sector. Executive conversations are handled confidentially — nothing moves without your say-so.
