Remote engineering search · Europe & North America
We take engineering hires with three or four hard constraints at once. Usually a few hundred people on earth clear all of them, and nearly all are employed and content. We find them by name, approach them one at a time, and tell you exactly how many there were.
Two people, two searches at a time. You get the person who wrote the map, on every call, until someone starts.
We don't keep a candidate database. Every search is mapped from nothing, because the last one was for somebody else's problem.
24-07 · staff engineer, storage internals · remote EU · closed in 31 days
Wrote the crash-consistent write path for a 400-node object store. Rust since 2017. Lisbon, CET. Would move for scope; money is not the lever. Weak on: has never managed anyone — you said that's fine
Maintains an io_uring binding that two databases you've heard of depend on. Contracting now, wants permanent for the first time in six years. Kraków. Weak on: no formal storage title — the work is all in public commits
Ex-storage, currently doing platform work he's bored by. Slowest of the six to reply, strongest on the technical call. Berlin. Weak on: counter-offer risk is real, he's well paid and well liked
One dot, one engineer. Click a stage to step through it.
What we take on
Any one of them is a normal hire. Together they cut the market to a few hundred people, and the number below each role is how many we found when we counted.
Rust in production, io_uring, and has personally shipped a crash-consistent write path. Not "interested in systems" — has the postmortem.
€150–175k base · fully remote EU
Writes CUDA kernels and has owned cost per million tokens as a number on a dashboard rather than as an aspiration.
$220–260k base · US remote
ISO 26262 evidence they have actually signed off, Zephyr in anger, and able to hold their own in a room full of hardware engineers.
€120–145k base · remote EU
Has taken a double-entry ledger through an external audit and lived with the consequences of getting reconciliation wrong.
£95–120k base · remote UK/EU
And what we send back
Before we write to anyone
More remote searches die here than on the shortlist: the right person is in a country you can't employ in, or wants a contract structure your finance team has never signed. We settle it in the brief. Below is how the last two years of placements were actually employed.
| Country | How we've employed there | Overlap | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poland | B2B contract, occasionally EOR | CET +0 | Senior engineers usually prefer B2B and will quote you net. Expect that conversation. |
| Portugal | EOR, or your own entity if you have one | CET −1 | Contractor status is common and risky for a permanent hire. We push clients to EOR. |
| Spain | EOR | CET +0 | Ask about the expat tax regime before you quote gross. It changes the offer materially. |
| Serbia | Contractor or EOR | CET +0 | Deep systems talent, thin local competition, and most agencies aren't looking. |
| United Kingdom | Own entity or EOR | CET −1 | If you go contractor, IR35 is your problem and it will become ours. |
| Canada | EOR | CET −5 to −8 | Only worth mapping if you'll accept a three-hour overlap. Say so up front and we'll include it. |
We're not lawyers or an EOR reseller, and we take nothing from the providers we name. This is what we've watched work and fail across roughly forty placements. Your counsel gets the final word.
How the search runs
Same sequence every time. If a date slips you hear it from us before you notice it.
Ninety minutes. We leave with four constraints, the two we're allowed to trade, the band, the employment route, and the three companies you'd be delighted to poach from.
Everyone we believe can do this job, with an evidence line each. You strike anyone you know, are already talking to, or would never hire. What's left is the search, and now you know its size.
Each message names your company, the problem and the band. No sequences, no InMail blasts. You get replies and refusals weekly, including the ones that sting.
A page each: what they've built against every constraint, what they want, what they'd cost, where they're weak. You should be able to reject one for a reason we already flagged.
We prep both sides for every stage, benchmark the offer before you send it, and stay close through notice and counter-offer. Searches that die late, die here.
Fees
Invoiced in the currency the salary is in. Nothing is contingent on anything you haven't already read here.
| Model | Fee | Billed | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retained | 22% of first-year base | In thirds: on brief, on shortlist, on start date | We hold a search slot and turn down other work. Exclusive for 60 days. |
| Contingent | 20% of first-year base | On start date only | Offered only on roles we're confident we can fill, and we'll say so on the call. |
If they leave, or you let them go, inside the first ninety days, we run the search again once at no fee. It's happened twice. Both times we'd read the team wrong, and we said so at the time.
Who you work with
“They sent four people and I still think about the one we didn't hire. What was different was that every profile told me where the person was weak before I found out myself.”
There are two of us. We each run one search at a time, occasionally two. Nobody junior touches your role because there is nobody junior. When the slots are full we say so and give you a date rather than starting badly.
Start here
A few lines is enough. You get a written answer from a person within one working day, including "this isn't for us, here's who I'd call instead", which is the answer about half the time.
What to put in it