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Experience

Case Studies Based on Practical Experience

CTO Placement for an Australian Company Establishing a Sri Lanka Development Center

Client Background

The client is an Australian company that made the decision to establish a development center in Sri Lanka, rather than continuing to hire individual remote contractors. This shift meant the company needed to build a genuine local technical operation, not just add headcount, but establish technical leadership on the ground. 

The Challenge

Setting up a development center from scratch starts with one critical hire: the CTO or senior technical leader who will build the team, set technical standards, and represent the parent company’s engineering culture locally. This is a uniquely difficult search. The candidate needed strong technical leadership credentials, but also the ability to operate independently, build a team from zero, and stay aligned with a parent company on the other side of the world. 

Getting this hire wrong would have jeopardized the entire development center initiative, a bad technical leader early on shapes hiring standards and team culture for years afterward. 

Our Approach

Formix ran this as a dedicated executive search, treating it as a foundational hire rather than a standard technical placement. We screened candidates specifically for experience building technical teams from an early stage, not just leading existing ones, since the ability to hire, structure, and stand up a function is a different skill from managing one that already exists. 

We also assessed each candidate’s ability to operate with genuine autonomy while maintaining close alignment with an overseas parent company, a combination that matters enormously in cross-border development center setups, where the local leader effectively becomes the technical face of the company on the ground. 

The Result

Formix placed a CTO who successfully took on the technical leadership of the client’s new Sri Lanka development center, building out the engineering team and establishing technical standards from the ground up. The placement gave the Australian company the local leadership it needed to run its development center as a genuine extension of its technology function, rather than a loosely managed offshore arrangement.

Ready to find your next C-Suite leader? Formix delivers executive search and market mapping across Sri Lanka, Australia, the Maldives, and beyond. formix.live Contact us