About

A small, senior-led firm with a single focus.

Mastella Search is built around engineering and technical recruitment. No second business line, no junior army, no distractions.

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What we are

Boutique recruitment for technical businesses.

Mastella Search is an engineering and technical recruitment firm. We help technical and industrial businesses hire engineers, technical leaders, and operational leadership — in the UK and internationally where the brief calls for it.

We are deliberately small. A senior consultant runs every search end to end, which means the person you brief is the person making the calls and writing the candidate reports. There is no resourcer layer.

We work across engineering, manufacturing, energy and renewables, the built environment, and operations leadership — always with engineering and technical content at the centre.

Leadership

Founded and led by Kirsty Smith.

Senior consultants only means something specific here: every search is run end to end by the person who founded the firm.

Founder & Managing Director

Kirsty Smith

kirsty@mastellagroup.com

Years in technical recruitment

500+

Roles placed

FSE → Director

Breadth of brief

Kirsty founded Mastella Search and runs the business day to day. She has spent the last 25 years in technical recruitment, and has personally placed more than 500 hires across the full breadth of engineering organisations.

That breadth matters. The roles she has delivered run from field service engineers and shop-floor technical hires through to engineering managers, heads of engineering, and engineering directors. It is the kind of range that only comes from putting the time in — and it is what lets her calibrate a brief quickly and read a candidate honestly.

Every engagement she takes on is run by her, end to end. Brief, search, shortlist, offer, onboarding. There is no resourcer layer to hand it to, and there is no plan to add one.

Book a call with Kirsty How we work

How we operate

Four operating principles.

These are not aspirational. They are the things we are willing to lose engagements over.

Small by design

We stay small on purpose. Senior consultants only, a tightly held client list, and capacity reserved for the searches we can do properly.

Senior throughout

The person you brief is the person doing the work. No resourcer pipeline, no farmed-out outreach, no handoffs after the kick-off.

Responsive

Same-day replies are the standard, not the exception. Searches move at the pace you need them to.

Discreet

Most of our best work is invisible. Confidentiality cuts both ways — for clients and for the candidates we represent.

Get in touch

If this sounds like the kind of search firm you want to work with.

A short call usually tells both of us whether there's a fit.

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