Roles we place / Leadership & specialty / Staff / Principal Engineer
Cadre is the boutique recruiting firm high-growth startups use to hire staff 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.
Staff-plus is the force-multiplier tier: engineers whose impact routes through architecture, mentorship, and taste rather than headcount. The archetypes genuinely differ — tech lead, architect, solver, right-hand — and most failed staff searches fail at scoping, when a company wants one archetype and interviews for another. At high-growth scale the role usually means owning the hardest technical bet in the company: the migration, the platform, the system that decides whether next year’s roadmap is possible. The classic diligence mistake is taking big-company titles at face value — a staff engineer supported by platform teams, SREs, and a paved road is a different animal from one who built alone — so screen for scope-per-support-structure, not title. The tell of the real thing is trailing impact: senior engineers around them get visibly better within a quarter, and their design docs are still cited two teams away.
| Level | Typical range (base) | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Staff | $230k – $300k | $265k |
| Senior Staff | $270k – $340k | $300k |
| Principal | $300k – $380k+ | $335k |
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.
Past ~25 engineers, usually yes — someone has to own the decisions no single team can. Before that, a great senior with staff trajectory is often the smarter hire, and we’ll say so.
Some — the ones who built without the platform org. That’s precisely what our screens probe, because the title transfers far more easily than the self-sufficiency.
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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