Hiring software engineers 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 engineering hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, lose a key engineering leader, have had engineering hires that didn’t work out, or need more recruiting capacity for technical roles without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

We fill frontend, backend, full-stack, and mobile engineers, including iOS and Android, from founding and associate engineers through senior, staff, and principal levels, as well as engineering managers and directors, up to vice president of engineering. We also fill application programming interface and integration engineers, embedded and firmware engineers, systems software engineers, and developer tools engineers.

Quality engineering sits next to software engineering, and we fill those roles too: quality assurance engineers, test automation engineers, and software development engineers in test. Most of that hiring has moved from manual testing to automation in recent years.

Software engineering is part of our technical recruiting practice. As software engineer recruiters for high-growth tech companies, we hire engineers directly onto your team as employees, and the recruiter on your search has hired engineers at your stage before.

A common assumption is that a recruiter has to be an engineer to know what a good one looks like. The first screen isn’t a technical evaluation, so it doesn’t need to be. It needs a recruiter who knows exactly what you’re looking for and who has interviewed enough engineers across enough companies to recognize who will work at your stage. Your engineers join at the hiring manager interview, where candidates want to hear about the work from someone who does it. From there, your engineers evaluate technical fit.

Your engineers also shouldn’t be doing their own sourcing and first screens. Response rates on cold outreach to engineers are low, so reaching one hire takes a lot of outreach, and screening people out on interest, logistics, and fit adds hours on top. That time comes out of building the product.

Another challenge is leveling. Hiring managers often tie seniority to years of experience, but what sets real seniority is the work someone has done and the impact it had on a product. A small team with little support around the hire needs an engineer who has built something from scratch, delivered it, and driven it without a more senior engineer guiding them, whether their title said senior, staff, or principal.

Founding engineer searches are among the hardest to run. Convincing a strong engineer to leave a stable job for a company that hasn’t built its product yet takes selling the opportunity the right way. The engineer you want there has usually built something from zero to one before, and a brilliant engineer from a large company may never have had to.

Hiring from famous engineering teams works when there’s a reason behind it. If you know how a company builds and that’s the engineering culture you want, source from it. If the only reason is the name, the search can lose months to candidates who were never going to fit, and a well-known team doesn’t always work in the language you’re hiring for.

Some searches stall on a role written for someone who has done everything. The overwhelming majority of engineers won’t match that profile, and the role stays open while you wait for one who does.

Fear of a wrong hire can stall a search too. Teams keep interviewing for a candidate with a wow factor, and months later they realize they could already have hired several of the people they spoke to.

The job itself is also changing. Some large engineering organizations now expect most of an engineer’s code to be written with AI, and every team is taking a different approach. In our view, reasoning, problem-solving, and system design are becoming the markers of a strong engineer, and your own policy on AI use decides which skills matter after that. We screen for how an engineer works with AI and whether they understand what it produces.

We start by scoping the role with your hiring manager, beyond the job description: the product and the stack, the size of the team and the support around the hire, what the role will own, and the red flags. We also ask which company backgrounds haven’t worked out for you before, and what you’d want asked in a first screen to know whether someone is worth your team’s time.

We recommend running the technical assessment after the hiring manager interview, not straight after the first screen. Asking a strong engineer for hours of work before they’ve spoken to anyone doing the job increases drop-out. For the assessment itself, we recommend a take-home assignment that candidates are encouraged to use AI on, followed by a live review with one of your engineers, where the candidate explains their approach and builds a couple of iterations. It shows whether they can guide the model and make an architecture decision on the spot.

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.

On engineering searches, we only reach out to engineers who have a real chance of getting through your process, and we frame the role around what they’ve done before. For a small number of the hardest-to-reach candidates, we recommend having the message come from your hiring manager, chief technology officer, or an engineer on your team, once we’re certain the person is someone they’d consider strong. Where a candidate has worked with someone on your team, we’ll use that for a warm introduction.

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 software engineering 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.