84% of the candidates we send, you’ll want to interview.

Most searches run contingency: we work, you interview, you pay only when you hire. For critical or confidential searches we offer container engagements — a portion up front, dedicated senior attention, the balance on the hire. For teams hiring several engineers at once, we structure multi-role volume arrangements. The model flexes to the engagement; what never flexes is our selectivity and the 84% standard. And like most boutiques, we’re at our best with clients who bring us all their engineering hiring — context compounds with every search we run for you.

A percentage of first-year compensation, with the structure depending on the model above. We’re not the budget option and don’t pretend to be — our fees reflect senior recruiters, a published standard, and pipelines that don’t waste your calendar. Book a call and we’ll give you real numbers for your situation rather than a range that means nothing.

High-growth startups that are serious about the engineering bar — funded or revenue-generating, ready to move when the right person shows up, and looking for a partner rather than a vendor. We’re a deliberate mismatch for teams shopping for the cheapest fee or racing five agencies on the same role: we only take searches we know we can produce on, and that requires actually knowing your company.

No. Much of our work is with venture-backed companies — and tier-one VC talent teams have referred us to their portfolios for 19 years — but we work with PE-backed companies, bootstrapped businesses with real revenue, and everything in between. What matters is the growth and the bar, not the cap table.

Software engineering, exclusively — and all of it. The core families: frontend, backend, fullstack, and mobile; applied ML, GenAI, LLM ops, computer vision, NLP, MLOps, and robotics; data engineering and data science; DevOps, SRE, platform, and QA; security and DevSecOps; and engineering leadership from EM to VP. Plus the crossover roles that don’t fit a checkbox: forward-deployed engineers, GPU and performance engineers, dev-tools and compiler engineers, founding engineers who are half-CTO. If the job is building software, we’ve almost certainly placed it — and if a role is truly outside our lane, we’ll say so and point you to someone good.

In layers. A real intake conversation first — not a form — capturing what someone actually wants, avoids, and is great at. Then our matching engine scores both overall quality and fit for your specific role, trained on nineteen years of submission and interview outcomes. Then a senior recruiter makes the final call, because the last filter is always human judgment. And then the candidate vets you: they review your company and opt in before we ever make the intro. If any layer says no, you never see the profile.

Never have — not once since 2007. Every candidate we represent is sourced directly through our network, our data, and nineteen years of relationships. The engineers you want aren’t reading job boards, so neither are we.

Faster than a search that starts from zero — because ours don’t. We work these roles continuously, so odds are we’re running searches like yours right now and already know who the right people are. There’s often a warm pipeline the day you sign: engineers we know, pre-matched, reviewing your company on their dashboards. The moment they confirm they’re excited, submissions start — often within days. What we won’t do is rush a bad fit to hit a date; a wrong hire costs you more than a slow one.

We extend your team, we don’t replace it. Most clients point us at the roles their team doesn’t have bandwidth or network for — senior, specialized, or brutally competitive searches. We feed candidates into your ATS, match your process, and move at your speed. Some clients hand us everything; others use us surgically. Both work.

Of course — most client relationships start exactly that way. Just know the economics of working with us improve with depth: every search we run for you compounds our understanding of your team, your bar, and your pitch, which makes the next one faster and sharper. Start with the hardest role you have. If we’re as good as we say, the rest of your hiring will find us.