Screened for how talented engineers think and debug.
Why STACK IT
Most agencies optimize for volume. We optimize for the one hire who’s right, vetted by people who understand the work.
We screen for how an engineer thinks, debugs, and creates code. No candidate reaches you without two of our recruiters signing off.
Fake profiles, proxy interviews, and AI-assisted answers are everywhere in tech hiring. We meet each candidate face-to-face on video and screen for AI patterns, so who you interview is who shows up.
A hire that leaves in a year isn’t a win. We align trajectory, growth, and total comp so the engineer grows with your team instead of moving on.
Success-based and non-exclusive, no upfront fees, no retainers. We invoice on your engineer’s first day, not before.
The payoff
Hiring well costs less than you think, and a strong hire changes far more than the work in front of them.
Features ship on schedule.
Predictable delivery is what a strong engineer commits to.
Your codebase stays cheap to change.
Clean work keeps the cost of every future feature low.
Quieter on-call, fewer fire drills.
Production-mature engineers build for failure.
Your senior engineers stay leveraged.
A strong hire raises the floor and lifts the whole team’s output.
You scale without re-platforming.
Sound architecture means growth doesn’t force a costly rewrite.
How we screen
We screen for how software engineers and developers actually think. Every shortlist is judged against the same five criteria that predict whether someone delivers in your codebase.
Strong signal
Moves between the problem and the implementation without friction, and reaches for the right tool instead of the familiar one.
Falls short
Leans on memorized patterns that fall apart the moment the problem shifts shape.
Strong signal
Writes for the people who come after them: readable, tested, and structured so it survives the next change.
Falls short
Clever over clear. It works today and quietly costs you for a year.
Strong signal
Forms a hypothesis, isolates the fault, and fixes the root so the same bug does not return.
Falls short
Guesses, patches the surface, and ships the same failure twice.
Strong signal
Weighs trade-offs, anticipates where it has to scale, and knows when not to over-build.
Falls short
Builds in isolation, so every change becomes someone else's cleanup later.
Strong signal
Explains technical calls in plain terms and gets alignment before a line of code is written.
Falls short
Disappears into the code and surprises the room at the demo.
Proof it works
Discover what changed once the right hire joined our clients’ team.
An early-stage SaaS team had lost faith in their CI pipeline: flaky tests, red builds, no one trusting a green checkmark. The engineer we placed audited the failing suites, added coverage tracking, and rebuilt the test layers from unit to end-to-end, taking build reliability from 42% to 91% inside four weeks.
Restructured a fintech billing engine for clarity and added integration tests across the reconciliation flow.
Led live debugging to restore a broken workflow without a rollback, then left monitoring and alerting behind.
Real technical screening, a calibrated shortlist in days, and candidates vetted for fit, not just resumes. Let’s start your search.
Specializations
Whatever your team runs on, we screen for the people who do the work right.
APIs, services, and the data layer everything else depends on.
Interfaces that stay fast, accessible, and maintainable as they grow.
End-to-end feature ownership, from the database to the UI.
The cost of waiting
An empty seat doesn’t delay work, it redistributes it. The longer the search drags, the more it costs.
Every week a role stays open, the cost lands on the team you already have.
Speed isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a gap and a setback.
Time to fill this role
How you hire
Two models, one standard of quality. Bring on the software engineers and developers you need the way that fits your timeline and budget.
Permanent
Best when you’re building the team for the long term.
Contract
Best when you need delivery capacity now, without adding headcount.
Not sure which fits? Compare permanent vs. contract
FAQ
The questions teams usually ask before starting a search with us.
It depends on whether the code has to live. Marketplaces and offshore development shops are genuinely good at scoped, finishable work: a landing page, an integration, a prototype. The economics stop working when the software is your product, because every decision made by someone who leaves becomes debt your team inherits. A full-time developer on your own payroll builds context that compounds, sits in your code reviews, and is still there when the thing they built breaks at 2 a.m. That is the work we recruit for, permanent or contract, in-house on your team rather than a vendor bench.
We do not use take-home projects or timed coding tests. Our screening is recruiter-led and scenario-based: we walk through real systems a candidate has built, probe the tradeoffs they made, and have them explain their decisions in plain terms. Someone who can teach back why they chose an approach tells us far more about production judgment than a whiteboard puzzle. It is the core of how we screen.
Seniority here is measured by scope rather than years. We look for engineers who own production impact, make sound architectural tradeoffs, and can explain their decisions to non-engineers, versus strong mid-levels who execute well within a set direction. We calibrate the shortlist to the level you actually need. This role sits inside our software engineering recruitment practice, alongside front-end developer and mobile developer searches.
Both are common. Long-term product ownership and platform stability usually call for permanent hires, while time-boxed builds, surges, and specialized one-off work often fit contract. We will tell you honestly which the role needs.
You will typically see a first vetted candidate within 24 to 48 hours and a calibrated shortlist of three to five within about five business days, depending on how specialized the stack is.
Permanent hires are success-based: you pay only when someone starts, with no upfront fee, backed by our 90-day guarantee. Contract runs on a transparent hourly rate. We will walk you through the specifics on an intro call.
Start with a calibrated brief: the stack, the seniority, the salary band, and what the first six months look like. From there a search runs in two lanes: post-and-screen for roles with strong inbound, proactive sourcing for everything else, which is most developer roles, since the strongest programmers are employed and not applying. Working with a firm like ours compresses that to a vetted shortlist in about two weeks, with a fee due only when your direct hire starts.
Toronto is Canada’s price-setter for engineering talent: intermediate software engineers typically land within the band shown on this page, senior engineers clear it, and the title matters less than people expect, developers and engineers with the same shipping record price the same. Remote-first employers across the country pay within reach of Toronto rates to compete for the same people. Full bands by seniority and city are in our 2026 Canadian Tech Salary Guide.
Still have a question? Talk to a recruiter
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Share the role and we’ll reply within one business day with a calibrated shortlist of three to five software engineers and developers, screened for your stack and your team.
