I've been the CPO who had to rebuild after a bad placement. That's why I don't run a staffing marketplace. Every engineer I place is someone I've personally evaluated against your specific situation.
Most agencies optimize for passing your screen, not for performing on your team. The candidate looks sharp in 45 minutes. Six weeks later you're writing follow-up messages that never get answered.
Their job was the placement. Once that happened, you were on your own. Nobody on their side has skin in whether the engineer ships anything or stays for six months.
Technical skill is table stakes. What actually costs you sprints is an engineer who can't read the room, can't find the right person to unblock them, and can't make judgment calls in ambiguous situations.
Senior augmentation should reduce management overhead, not add to it. If you're spending more time on the contractor than on your roadmap, the placement was wrong from the start.
I don't review resumes. I evaluate how an engineer thinks about your problem, how they handle ambiguity, and whether they will make your existing team better or slower. Fifteen years building product orgs shapes that screen.
If you're building anything with AI in the stack, your engineers need to understand the context, not just the syntax. I don't place engineers who treat ML as a black box. It's a baseline expectation, not an add-on.
Engineers work in your tools, attend your standups, and report to your team lead. I'm not managing them. You are. I stay available for the duration so problems surface before they cost you a sprint.
Before I recommend anyone, I need to understand where your team actually is. What's breaking, what's missing, and what the gap is really costing you. Most clients come in asking for one role and leave knowing they needed a different one.
60 minutes. No commitment required.
I review candidates against your specific situation, not a job description. You get a written brief on each engineer explaining why they fit your problem. You interview the ones you want to meet.
You make the call. I give you the context to make it well.
The engineer joins your team on your tools, in your standups, reporting to your lead. I stay in the loop for the first 30 days, check in at 60, and stay available if anything needs adjusting. The engagement is yours to own.
No lock-in contracts. Everything built is yours.
Founders and technical leads who are past the “let's try a staffing agency” phase. Companies building AI-adjacent products that can't afford to explain what a transformer is to every new hire. Teams that need senior capability without a senior full-time cost. If you have been burned before and you need someone with the same skin in the game you have, this is the right conversation.
Fixed scope, defined deliverable, one engineer fully focused. Right for a specific feature, a technical debt reduction push, or a build you need to ship without pulling your core team off roadmap work.
One or more engineers integrated into your team on a rolling monthly basis. Right for teams scaling a product in production who need senior capacity without the full-time hiring process.
For companies building AI-native products that need engineers with real ML fluency. Evaluated specifically against your model, your data pipeline, and your deployment context. Not just API wrappers.
Toptal is a marketplace with a test. An agency has a quota. I have a reputation. Every engineer I place reflects on me directly. That's a different incentive structure, and it produces different results.
You tell me. I'm in the loop for the first 30 days specifically so problems surface early. If it's not the right fit, we address it before it costs you a sprint. Placement isn't the finish line for me.
Project engagements are 4 weeks minimum. Ongoing augmentation is a 3-month rolling engagement. I don't do week-to-week placements because they don't give engineers time to actually contribute anything real.
No. But if you're building anything AI-adjacent, I won't place someone who can't reason about that layer of your stack. It's a baseline expectation for any engineer going into a modern product team.
No. If you had a perfect job description you'd probably have filled the role already. Bring the problem. We'll work out the right profile from there.
Book a 60-minute situation review. No commitment, no pitch deck. I'll tell you within that call whether I have the right engineer for your team and what the fastest path to getting them integrated looks like.