The Founders

Jake Rose

Jake partners with investors, boards and CEOs on critical technology leadership hires and the organisational decisions that sit around them.

He built and scaled one of Sydney's leading technology search practices from scratch, delivering C-suite appointments across private equity, ASX-listed and high-growth businesses on their most critical technology appointments.

His work spans CIO, CTO, CDO and Chief Product and Technology Officer searches, as well as the leadership teams that sit underneath them. That experience across infrastructure, cloud, data, AI and product means he advises clients on how technology organisations should be structured, sequenced and built for performance.

Jake works most closely with organisations navigating transformation, platform modernisation, AI adoption and product-led growth, where leadership quality directly affects execution and commercial outcomes.

Recent work includes executive hires and leadership builds across national retailers, SaaS platforms, fintech businesses and industrial services groups, with an increasing focus on AI executive search and the organisational design decisions that sit around AI leadership.

• CIO, CTO, CDO and CPO appointments
• Technology leadership succession and technology recruitment
• Org design and hire sequencing
• Technology leadership for transformation and value creation

Marie Higgins

Marie specialises in software, architecture and product hiring, from Head of roles to the teams that deliver beneath them. She operates across high-growth, PE-backed and listed businesses and has spent over eleven years in the Australian market.

She has one of the strongest track records in Australia for building gender-diverse technology teams. That is backed by placement data and repeat engagement from companies that treat diversity as a commercial measure and hold their hiring partners to it.

Marie founded a Women in Tech Meetup in 2023 and hosts a community of over 1,200 members, which gives her direct access to candidate networks most firms never reach. This is a network of engineering and product leaders who trust her because she has placed and supported them across their careers.

She partners with CTOs, CPOs and Heads of Engineering to assess candidates on capability and culture fit, and to build teams that deliver. She understands how technology teams should be structured and built for performance, and works closely with organisations scaling their engineering and product functions.

• Engineering, product and architecture leadership appointments
• Technical team hiring across all levels
• Diversity, equity and inclusive technology search
• Active WIT community of 1,200+ members

Lewis Heeks

Lewis has spent his career focused on data, AI and platform hiring in the Australian market. He was building data teams and placing data leaders long before AI became a boardroom priority.

Lewis is recognised as one of Australia's leading data and AI executive search specialists. He co-founded Innova after an established track record across some of the country's most prominent recruitment firms.

He works across the full data and AI function, from Chief Data Officer and Head of AI appointments through to data engineers, platform engineers, ML engineers and data scientists. That end-to-end coverage gives him a clear view of how data organisations should be structured, sequenced and built for performance.

His clients include PE-backed businesses, ASX-listed companies and scaling technology firms where data is central to the investment thesis or transformation agenda.

• Chief Data Officer and Head of AI appointments
• Data platform and engineering team hiring
• ML, AI and analytics capability across all levels
• Data strategy and org design advisory