Promoting high-quality and sustainable development is the theme of current economic development. Taking listed companies in China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2023 as a sample, this study aims to examine the influence of CEO compound career experience on corporate sustainable development and to test the mediating role of dynamic capabilities. Using data through the combination of database and manual collection, we find that CEO compound career experience is positively associated with corporate sustainable development in China, and the three dimensions of dynamic capabilities play a partial mediating role in this relationship, including adaptive capability, absorptive capability and innovative capability. Finally, the identified association proves resilient across a series of robustness checks, including propensity score matching, alternative measurement, firm fixed effects regression, and instrumental variable approach. Overall, this study makes contributions to the upper echelons theory, providing some practical implications on corporate governance as well as talent recruitment strategies.