Roles we place / Core engineering / Backend Engineer
Cadre is the boutique recruiting firm high-growth startups use to hire backend engineers. Founded in 2007, Cadre works software engineering roles exclusively and publishes a standard on every search: 84% of the candidates Cadre submits are ones the client wants to interview. Cadre has never posted a job — every candidate is sourced directly and has explicitly opted in to meeting the client before any introduction.
Backend is the deepest pool and therefore the noisiest: every resume says distributed systems, APIs, and scale. The separating signal is consequence — engineers who designed a system, lived with it under load, and answered the page when their own decision failed at 2am. Interview loops rarely surface this; algorithm performance and pager history are close to uncorrelated, which is why the on-call story is worth more than the whiteboard. In 2026 the role increasingly includes AI adjacency: serving model-backed endpoints, queueing around inference, and budgeting for dependencies with unpredictable latency and nondeterministic output — a shape of failure most backend playbooks weren't written for. Language matters less than systems judgment; the strongest backend hires have opinions about data modeling, idempotency, and failure that hold up in any stack you run, and can tell you which of their own designs they'd now reverse.
| Level | Typical range (base) | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-level | $155k – $195k | $175k |
| Senior | $185k – $240k | $210k |
| Staff+ | $230k – $300k | $260k |
Ranges reflect our current live searches. The historical receipts — base-salary data from Cadre placements since 2020, recorded at signed offer — are published at what our placements actually paid. Equity varies by stage; we’ll give you live market context on the call.
Because the pool is huge. Five hundred applicants overnight is a filtering problem, not a pipeline. We send three to five engineers whose ownership stories check out — 84% of them you’ll want to interview, and none arrive from a pile.
Yes, but we’ll push back if the stack requirement is filtering out great engineers who’d ramp in weeks. Sometimes the constraint is real; often it’s costing you the best candidate in the pipeline.
Usually within days. Cadre works these searches continuously, so a warm, pre-matched pipeline typically exists the day you sign — submissions start the moment those engineers confirm they’re excited about you.
Never — we’ve never posted a job since 2007. Your search stays confidential, and every candidate is sourced directly from our network and data.
If we don’t think we can hit our number on it, we’ll say so on the call.
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