It is also where a distinction matters that most search firms never make, because most of them come from the other side of it.
Product development, not IT
There are two kinds of engineering. IT keeps a company running — the systems, the infrastructure, the support. Product development builds the thing the company sells. The hiring looks similar from a distance and is different in almost every way that counts: what the work is, what good looks like, what a candidate's record actually proves.
We grew up around engineering — product development engineering. That is the world this firm was built in, and it is why we can identify and deliver the best engineers in it. We know what it means to ship a product: the tradeoffs between the release date and the architecture, the engineer who has carried a product through versions instead of maintaining someone else's, the difference between a record of building and a record of administering. A résumé lists both the same way. A conversation run by someone from that world does not confuse them.
So this practice does not recruit from job posts, and neither do the people worth hiring answer them. We recruit professionals who are not on the market and develop their interest properly, so that by the time you meet them they understand your opportunity and want the conversation.
Five people, and the first product
At a Boston company building a wearable product athletes train with, we placed five people — the original senior software engineer, the original hardware engineer, and product management and data science hires alongside them. All of them worked with the founding CTO and CEO to create the first product.
Read that again, because it is the whole practice in one sentence. Not staff augmentation, not backfill — the people who built version one, across software, hardware, product, and data, hired before there was a product to point to or a name to recruit against. The senior software engineer we placed went on to run the software team, in the years before the company grew to any kind of scale.
And the outcome is worth stating plainly. When those hires were made, the company was a Series A-funded startup. It has since been valued at $10.1 billion — at its March 2026 funding round — and is still private. We do not claim credit for that outcome; companies earn their own valuations. But the foundation it was earned on is the early team, and five of that team came through us. The company grew into one of the defining names in its category on that foundation: at that stage there is no bench, no process, and no one to hide behind. Every hire is load-bearing.
That is the recurring shape of this practice: early teams at product companies, placed before the company was a name, by a firm that could tell a product engineer from an IT résumé because it grew up in that world.
The pattern is not new
The same record runs back decades. A travel company that began as two founders above a pizza shop in Needham: before it existed, we had placed one of its founders — as an engineer. When the two started the company, the chief executive called us. We placed its first engineer — still there today — and its first product manager, then close to sixty people over the following decade: senior engineers, the search specialist, web UI developers, the first team leader, a dozen product managers, directors, and the vice presidents of engineering who came after them.
And one part of that record deserves its own line. We built that company's entire data science team — before data science was known as a practice in its own right. It started with a distinction most firms would have missed at the time: instead of another software engineer doing analysis on the side, we placed the company's very first true scientist, who set up a lab so the company could run A/B testing on its SEO. The team that followed grew from that hire. Recognizing that a scientist was not an engineer with different tools — that it was a different discipline, needing a different search — is the same judgment this practice runs on today, now that the discipline has a name and every firm claims it.
Different products, same lesson: hire number one sets the bar, and the sixty who follow have to clear it.
The roles
- Senior, Staff, and Principal Software Engineers
- Backend and Full-Stack Engineers
- Frontend / Web UI Engineers
- Platform and Infrastructure Engineers
- DevOps / SRE Engineers
- Search and Data-Platform Engineers
- Engineering Team Leads
How a software search runs here
Every search starts with calibration, not a job description: if this placement is a success a year from now, what will we be pointing to that really worked? Then the work runs on the Inbound Recruitment Playbook — plan, attract, evaluate, interview, deliver, hire, retain — the seven-step process behind every search we take.
Two parts of it matter most at this level. Evaluation goes beyond the resume: candidates are measured against the success profile, not against each other. And before any offer is extended, we put the brakes on: acceptance is verified before anything is put in writing, so offers land instead of expiring in negotiation. Across the firm, that is part of how 98% of offers are accepted, and how the final interview-to-hire ratio runs 2:1 on many searches.
Start with the question
Every software and platform search we run starts with one question: a year from now, what worked? Tell us where you're headed and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right firm to get you there. If we're not, we'll tell you who is.
Current openings, in this practice and otherwise, live on the jobs page — that is the one place they stay current.