Family Office and Private Investment Office

We work directly with principals. Not through intermediaries.

Retained and contingency search for CIO, Chief of Staff, Investment Director, and senior leadership roles at single-family offices, multi-family offices, and private investment vehicles across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

Family offices do not hire like institutions. The brief is rarely written down. The cultural requirement matters as much as the functional one. The wrong candidate — however strong on paper — can do lasting damage to a structure built around personal trust. This is not a search you run through a job posting, and it is not a process that benefits from a firm that does not already know the principal.
Ateca has built direct relationships with family offices and private investment offices over years of working in the private wealth market. We understand the difference between a family office that operates as a full investment management platform and one that functions primarily as a holding and governance structure. We understand that what works in one office — in terms of candidate personality, cultural alignment, and working style — will fail in another.
The majority of our family office work is retained. For operational and mid-senior roles where the family office has an established relationship with us, we also work on a contingency basis. In either case, we bring the same approach: we present only candidates who have been assessed against the specific requirements of that office, not just the job specification. We do not present people we have not met.

Mandate Types

  • Chief Investment Officer — single-family offices with direct investment programmes across liquid, private, and real assets
  • Deputy CIO and Investment Director — with specific asset class mandates or geographic focus
  • Chief of Staff — reporting directly to the principal or the family governance body
  • Head of Private Equity and Head of Real Assets — for offices running direct deal programmes
  • Chief Operating Officer and Head of Operations — for established offices requiring professional infrastructure
  • Head of Philanthropy and Impact — as principal families build formal philanthropic strategies
  • Advisory Board and Non-Executive Director appointments
  • Senior hires at multi-family offices competing for institutional-quality talent from bank environments

Cross-Border Considerations

We work on a small number of family office mandates at any one time. This is intentional. Every search is conducted by a senior partner, with full confidentiality from brief to offer.