Platform, infrastructure, and cloud recruiting for high-growth tech companies

Our customers are venture capital-backed, high-growth tech companies, from startup to growth stage and enterprise; they range from 15 employees to over 50,000. Companies usually call us about infrastructure hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, land larger customers and have to scale quickly, have had infrastructure hires that didn’t work out, or need more recruiting capacity for technical roles without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

We fill platform engineers, infrastructure engineers, cloud engineers, DevOps engineers, and site reliability engineers, including the hybrid roles between them, such as backend-platform engineers. We also fill systems engineers, network engineers, database engineers and administrators, release engineers, and observability engineers, as well as engineering managers and directors for platform and infrastructure teams.

Platform and infrastructure hiring is part of our technical recruiting practice, and the recruiter on your search has hired these engineers at your stage before.

DevOps was a way of working before it was a job title, and the role has since moved closer to site reliability engineering. Platform, infrastructure, and backend work often overlap in one role, so two engineers with the same title can do very different jobs. We scope the search on what the person needs to own, whatever their last title said.

Another challenge is the environment. Most infrastructure has moved to the cloud, and cloud engineers work across very different setups. Some companies are also moving workloads back to their own data centers because of privacy concerns, which makes systems engineering experience relevant again. We match candidates to the environment they’ll be working in.

The stage of your company also has a significant impact. A startup’s first infrastructure engineer usually has little support around them, so they need to have built infrastructure from scratch and run it themselves. An engineer from a large company with a dedicated platform organization can be excellent and still struggle without that support.

Scoping starts with your hiring manager and covers whether your infrastructure runs in the cloud, in your own data centers, or both; whether the role leans toward platform, reliability, or infrastructure; how much backend code it involves; the size of the team around the hire; and what the role owns. We also ask what the job description leaves out, such as red flags and the company types whose engineers haven’t worked out on your team, so our first screen can catch them.

Our recruiters run the first screen. We recommend having an engineer from your team join the hiring manager interview, because candidates want the technical detail of the role from someone doing the work.

We also check track records. We tell candidates in the first round that we require references from previous direct managers at the offer stage. How candidates react to that tells us a lot.

At kickoff, we review the roles with your hiring team and align on the interview process. Within 48 hours after the kickoff meeting, we meet with the hiring managers again to have a calibration meeting. We bring 10 candidate profiles to the table to ensure that we’re aligned and only interviewing relevant talent.

1. 48hours

   Calibration meeting

2. 3-7days

   Initial recruiter screens

3. 7-10days

   Hiring manager interviews

4. 2-3weeks

   Full qualified candidate pipeline per role

5. 30days

   Initial hires

6. 90days

   On track against the hiring plan

Initial recruiter screens happen in 3-7 days, and hiring manager interviews in 7-10 days. You have a full qualified candidate pipeline per role in 2-3 weeks. Initial hires typically land in roughly 30 days, and you’re on track against the hiring plan by 90. Time-to-fill runs 15-60 days depending on seniority and scope.

A common hiring mistake is picking the best of the first handful of people you speak to. We focus heavily on outbound sourcing to engage with a lot of talent. This ensures that you’re able to hire the best people on the market.

Along the way, our recruiters meet with your hiring managers weekly and communicate updates daily in your chat channels. You also get weekly metrics from the delivery lead who manages recruiter performance. Our recruiters also have access to our tech stack that accelerates identifying and reaching out to top talent: strategic AI sourcing and AI resume matching, multi-step, multi-channel outreach, and job postings. Everything runs in your systems, and you own your data and your candidate pool.

Most of the platform and infrastructure hiring we do runs through Embedded Recruiting and RPO: a recruiter working only on your business, inside your systems. If your hiring is consistent, or there’s enough work for at least one full-time recruiter, it also cuts down on cost-per-hire. The engagement scales with your hiring plan, from adding capacity to your internal recruiting team to running recruiting as your talent function. You can see how these engagements run in our case studies.