I spend a lot of mornings in plant parking lots before the sun comes up, walking in with coffee and a hard hat to meet a VP of Engineering who is juggling product launches, field failures, and supplier drama. That pre-shift half hour tells me more about a leadership profile than any interview guide. Electrical engineering leadership lives at the edge of theory and risk, and the best executives wear both well. Over years as an engineering recruitment leader, I have learned to calibrate searches around three pillars that shape hard requirements and soft judgment alike: power electronics, embedded systems, and high-voltage safety. The mix varies by company, but those pillars keep me honest when the hiring committee tries to turn one role into four.

On power electronics, I listen for how candidates talk about switching losses, thermal paths, and EMI, but I also look for their community of practice. People who stay current tend to publish, review, or at least show up where the discipline moves forward. The IEEE Power Electronics Society is a good tell because membership skews toward practitioners who keep pace with converter topologies and wide bandgap devices. That signal, paired with hands-on stories about failure analysis and field returns, often separates great directors from resume-deep managers.

On embedded systems, I want proof that firmware and hardware were managed as one organism. Good leaders can talk coherently about real-time scheduling quirks right next to board bring-up triage. I keep an eye on who shows up at Embedded Systems Week, particularly the EMSOFT and CODES+ISSS tracks, because people who present there tend to negotiate the messy boundary between compute budgets, safety, and manufacturability. The hallway track at ESWEEK is also where I hear how teams actually shipped constrained systems with security in mind.

High-voltage and product safety are the nonnegotiables. I still remember a Tuesday afternoon when a finalist calmly mapped a design decision to the specific clauses in IEC 61010-1 and the measurement-circuit guidance in IEC 61010-2-030. The plant manager leaned over and whispered, “Hire this person.” If your products touch information and communication technology categories, you should also expect literacy in the hazard-based approach of IEC 62368-1, which replaced legacy 60950 scopes in practice across many markets. For cross-sector functional safety, I probe familiarity with the lifecycle mindset in IEC 61508. These standards are not trivia, they are executive tools for risk, schedule, and market access.

What I actually do on a search

Here is how those pillars translate into the work. Last month I met a candidate at 7:15 a.m. in a lab that still smelled like rosin flux. He walked me through a post-mortem on an inverter failure and pointed at the test fixture while explaining why his team changed the gate-resistor network. Ten minutes later he was on a whiteboard defending a scheduling decision in a motor-control loop. That blend of tactile and abstract is the signature I chase. To build a slate with more people who can do that, I pair targeted outreach with credential checks and context from the standards world.

  • Source where the discipline lives. I scan technical leadership at ISSCC for IC leaders who grew into org-scale responsibilities and I track session chairs and authors at the Design Automation Conference when the role needs silicon leadership tied to EDA realities. For embedded executives, I mine ESWEEK speaker lists and program committees, then backchannel with collaborators who co-authored toolchains or middleware.
  • Use memberships and grades as signal, not gospel. The IEEE Senior Member grade indicates at least ten years of practice and five years of significant performance. I rarely treat it as a gate, but I do reward it as evidence that the community recognizes the person’s contributions.
  • Verify licensure when the work crosses regulated lines. If the executive bears legal responsibility for engineering services or sealing documents, I confirm the path and status through NCEES, including FE and PE progression and state nuances. I also ask candidates to walk me through the last time they navigated a comity application or a jurisdictional ethics question.
  • Interrogate safety fluency. For lab and factory-facing leaders, I look for active engagement with NFPA 70E practices and how those map to lockout-tagout training, PPE policies, and arc-flash labeling. If they supervise test equipment or IVD systems, I ask for specific examples tied to the appropriate 61010-series part.
  • Trace change through obsolescence cycles. I ask for one story where a team sunset a processor family or a power module and still hit the revenue plan. I want to hear who they retrained, which suppliers they called, and which reliability risks they accepted or eliminated, anchored to the safety case in 61508 where relevant.

Pillars that dictate the criteria

Power electronics. Director-level and above means stewardship of switching devices, magnetics, thermal, and compliance all at once. I probe how they set design rules for GaN and SiC, how they review loop stability, and how they keep EMI work from becoming a late-stage fire drill. Leaders who maintain a presence with communities like the IEEE PELS field of interest tend to manage that multidimensional risk better.

Embedded systems. Good executives build architectures where real-time constraints, security posture, and OTA strategy are negotiated in the open. I want proof that they ran software safety cases alongside hardware FMEAs and that they can defend a scheduler decision to a skeptical test engineer. I also ask how they recruit in places where the embedded community congregates, including ESWEEK and, for microarchitecture-aware roles, Hot Chips.

High-voltage safety and compliance. Executives should be able to translate clauses from IEC standards into plans that quality, regulatory, and operations can execute. I have candidates bring anonymized safety files to the onsite and explain their hazard analysis lineage. When I hear them connect IEC 62368-1 to earlier ICT norms and pair 61010 practice with NFPA 70E training calendars, I know they can carry the duty of care that boards expect.

Leadership vetting that actually predicts success

Reference calls help, but I put more weight on live working sessions. I often run a design review simulation with the hiring committee in the room. The candidate gets a thin packet with an aging MCU, a failing supplier for a power module, and a proposed migration plan. We watch how they balance safety, cost, time, and people. The best ones ask for field-failure data first, then regulatory impact, then the training burden on technicians. They cite the right standards without weaponizing them. They also narrate change in a way the shop floor can believe.

Another exercise I like is a rapid compliance map. I ask the candidate to write a 90-day plan for the safety and regulatory lane: which internal audits they will run, which external labs they will call, and which test fixtures need love. When someone anchors those steps in IEC or NFPA language and produces a credible staffing model, the committee can usually see the offer letter taking shape.

Licensure, titles, and the legal perimeter

Titles can hide risk. If the person will sign off on public safety or sealed documents, I verify the licensure path and status. Requirements vary by state and role, which is why I rely on NCEES guidance and, when needed, confirm PE exam history through official channels. I do not outsource that diligence to chance or to LinkedIn lines on a resume.

Diversity wins that move the business forward

I learned a long time ago that diversity is not a side quest. It is better engineering. When I brief a hiring committee, I include a simple dashboard that compares our candidate slate to national pipelines by discipline and degree level. For the baseline, I use the NSF NCSES report on women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in STEM and cross-check with ASEE’s Engineering by the Numbers. Those sources make it clear that representation gaps persist in engineering and, in many programs, are especially visible in electrical pathways. Sharing the baseline early helps the committee commit to outreach that actually expands the pool rather than recycling the same five names.

At the funnel level, I show stage-by-stage pass rates and note where the slate narrows. If every woman or URM candidate drops during the technical case review, it is a signal that our exercise might be screening for exposure rather than talent. Sometimes we fix that by providing a brief standards primer ahead of the session or by red-teaming the prompt so it reflects your actual design constraints, not a pet topic. The goal is not to lower the bar. The goal is to make sure the bar measures what matters.

How this looks in practice

One of my favorite placements started with a cold email to a presenter I heard at ISSCC. He was the quiet sort who would rather be in the lab than on a stage. We talked at 6 a.m. his time, he drew a buck converter on a napkin while explaining a control nuance, and he admitted he had never managed more than fifteen people. Six months later he was a VP with seventy reports, a standing monthly with EHS on 70E training, and a roadmap the board could read. The product line’s field failures fell, the NPI calendar stabilized, and the safety file passed a tough customer audit. The technical chops mattered, but the win came from the way he taught standards to his managers and insisted on closing the loop with manufacturing.

If you are about to run an electrical engineering executive search, build your criteria around those pillars, source in the communities that shape the field, verify the credentials that carry legal and safety weight, and bring diversity data to the table from day one. You will not just make a good hire. You will improve how your company learns, ships, and keeps people safe.