Technical leadership
for the energy transition.

For most of the last decade, energy executive search read as a single question: who can run the asset. Production, uptime, safety, cost per tonne or per megawatt-hour. The answer was almost always someone with twenty-five years inside the same fuel, the same geography, and the same operating model.

That brief still exists. Hydrocarbon businesses still need to be run with discipline, and the cash they generate funds almost everything that comes next. But it is no longer the whole brief, and it is rarely the brief that decides whether a company is still relevant in fifteen years.

The new brief is harder to write and harder to fill. It asks for leaders who can operate a mature business at full discipline, allocate capital across vintages of technology, stand up a credible low-carbon platform inside the same enterprise, and remain literate in the engineering and software decisions that now determine unit economics. That is what we mean by technical executive search, and it is the category our energy mandates increasingly fall into.

The phrase we keep returning to with clients is the energy stack. It is a borrowing from software, deliberate. A modern energy business is no longer a portfolio of independent assets. It is a stack: physical plant at the bottom, controls and telemetry above that, market and dispatch in the middle, and customer or off-take at the top.

Each layer of the stack used to belong to a different leader, and often a different company. They now have to be run together. A battery is a physical asset, a control system, a market participant and a contracted product, all at once. A green hydrogen project is a chemical plant, an electricity off-taker, a long-dated customer contract and a permitting exercise across three regulators. The leader who can hold all four layers in their head, and price the trade-offs between them, is the leader the sector is short of.

This is why our energy executive search work has shifted toward candidates with unusual combinations. Operating leaders with a trading background. Engineers who have run a P&L. Software people who have built physical things. Market designers who have actually dispatched. The market for these people is small. They do not respond to advertised roles, and they are almost never on the move when you need them.

The Romaris approach to energy executive search is partner-led by design. Each mandate is run by one of the founders, end to end. We do not pass the long-list to a researcher and re-appear at shortlist. The reason is practical: in a market this thin, the quality of a search is decided in the first ten conversations, and those conversations have to be had by someone with the credibility to have them.

We map the market in full rather than sampling it. That means the global population of candidates plausibly capable of the role, named, contacted, and assessed against the same brief, not the twenty names already known to the firm. For technical executive search this is non-negotiable. The right person for a Head of Trading & Optimisation role in Perth may sit in Houston, Calgary, Madrid or Singapore, and almost certainly is not looking.

And we stay close after the contract is signed. First hundred days, first board cycle, first market event. The hires we make are the ones we would want working alongside us, and the relationship does not end at signature.