As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".
Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years.
Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.
For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything.
With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.
Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.
And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management?
So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success.
Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)