Frequently Asked Questions

Internal teams are great at running the process, but most don't have the time to build and maintain a pipeline of senior engineers who aren't actively looking. That's where we spend all of ours. Our clients typically use us for the roles that have been open too long, the ones their team doesn't have the technical depth to screen, or the moments when they need to hire five people in a quarter without adding headcount to the recruiting team.

Hire Talent

Probably because the agency you worked with was paid to send resumes, and so it sent resumes. Most of the industry runs on volume: get a job order, blast it to a database, forward whoever replies, hope something sticks. We take fewer searches, learn each one properly, and send you three or four people we'd stake our name on instead of fifteen we wouldn't. If after the first batch you don't feel the difference, you've lost a week and nothing else — there's no fee until you hire.

On Direct Hire, you owe us nothing. That's the point of the model: the risk of a failed search sits with us, not with you. In practice, we tell you early if we think a role is unfillable as scoped — usually because of a mismatch between the requirements, the compensation and the market — and we'll show you the data behind that so you can decide whether to adjust.

Hire full-time for anything that will still matter in two years: core product, platform, the systems your team will have to live with. Bring in a contractor when the work has an end date, when you need a skill nobody on the team has and won't need permanently, or when you're not yet sure the role should exist. Contract-to-Hire is the honest middle ground when you believe in the role but want to see the person work before you commit. We'll push back if we think you're choosing the wrong model — a contractor on your core platform is cheap for six months and expensive for years.

Compare Hiring Models

Team Builder is for companies that know what they need to deliver but aren't sure which roles to hire for. Tell us about your project scope, timeline and budget, and we'll propose a complete team structure — roles, seniority levels and hiring model — and then help you fill it.

Build Your Team

You don't compete on their terms. The people who want the highest possible number will take it, and you should let them. What you can offer that a large company structurally can't: ownership of a whole system instead of a slice of one, decisions made in a room instead of a committee, and a direct line between someone's work and the company's outcome. There are excellent engineers who have done the big-tech tour and are actively looking for exactly that. The mistake is trying to reach them with a job description written to sound like Google's.

For most roles, hire the engineer. A strong backend developer moves from Java to Go in weeks; a mediocre one who already knows Go stays mediocre. The exceptions are real but narrow: specialized platforms like Salesforce, NetSuite or Dynamics 365, where the ecosystem knowledge is the job; deep infrastructure roles where production experience with a specific system matters; and situations where you need someone productive on day one with no runway. Outside those, a stack requirement is usually a filter that removes your best candidates first.

An individual contributor who could become the leader. Hiring a head of data before you have any data engineers means paying a leadership salary to someone who writes pipelines alone for a year and gets frustrated. Hiring a strong senior IC who has led before, with an understanding that the team will grow around them, gets the work started and gives you a leader who knows the system when it's time. The exception is when the function is political as much as technical — when the main job is getting the rest of the company to take it seriously. Then you need the title.

You can, and for some work you should — well-specified features, maintenance, QA, anything where the requirements are stable and the handoff is clean. Where it gets expensive is everything that isn't that: the ambiguous early stage of a product, systems that need someone to notice when the plan is wrong, and roles where the engineer needs to be in the room when decisions get made. Companies that offshore those end up hiring a senior US engineer anyway to manage the gap, and then they're paying for both. Decide by the type of work, not by the hourly rate.

Yes, and most of your competitors won't, which is why you should. Engineers from regulated industries are used to systems that can't go down, data that can't leak, and changes that have to be explained to someone who will ask hard questions. That's not legacy thinking — that's exactly what your product will need the moment it has real customers. What they may lack is speed and comfort with ambiguity, so look for the ones who are leaving because they want that, not because they were pushed. The transition works more often than the resume suggests.

Applying directly puts your resume in a pile that an ATS filters and a recruiter skims for seven seconds. Going through us means a hiring manager hears about you from someone they trust, with context on why you're a fit, and you get real information in return: what the team is actually like, why the last person left, where the compensation band really sits. And when it comes to the offer, we negotiate on your behalf — we only get paid if you accept, so we want the number to be one you're happy with.

See Open Roles

Because the best time to have a recruiter who knows you is before you need one. A twenty-minute conversation now means that when the right role opens — or when your situation changes unexpectedly — you're the first call, not one of three hundred applicants. We won't flood your inbox with roles that don't fit. We'll reach out when something is worth your time, and you can say no as often as you like.

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