The top 1%, vetted by practitioners.
Engineers, designers, QA specialists, AI experts, and technical consultants. Of every 1,000 applicants, six make it through. The pipeline is practitioner-led, evidence-driven, and intentionally brutal.
Every role on your roadmap.
One operating partner across the entire technical stack — sourced, vetted, and managed the same way.
Engineering
Senior product engineers who own systems end-to-end — from API design through deploy pipelines and on-call rotations.
- ·Frontend engineers
- ·Backend engineers
- ·Full-stack engineers
- ·Mobile (iOS / Android)
- ·DevOps & SRE
- ·Data & ML engineers
Design
Product designers who ship with engineering taste — fluent in systems thinking, accessibility, and motion.
- ·UI / UX designers
- ·Product designers
- ·Design systems leads
Quality
QA practitioners who think like engineers — automation-first, with a manual-testing safety net for the edges that matter.
- ·Manual QA engineers
- ·Automated QA / SDET
- ·QA leads
AI
Specialists who have actually shipped LLM and ML systems in production — and have the eval and observability stacks to prove it.
- ·AI consultants
- ·AI implementation specialists
- ·ML / LLM engineers
Consulting
Senior advisors who join your team for a defined outcome — architecture reviews, due diligence, technology selection, or platform migrations.
- ·Technical consultants
- ·IT consultants
- ·Development consultants
- ·Solutions architects
Product
Product managers who ship with engineering fluency — from roadmap prioritisation through metric definition and go-to-market coordination.
- ·Product managers
- ·Technical program managers
- ·Product operations
- ·Growth analysts
Hire the best person for the job.
We source across six continents and embed the result into your team. Same Slack, same standup, same payroll — wherever the best person actually lives.
Six stages. One survivor in 158.
Every stage is run by working practitioners — engineers, designers, and senior consultants — not external recruiters. We optimize for the people we'd hire onto our own team.
What each stage actually tests.
Signal screening
Beyond résumés. We look at commit history, system writing, design docs, and depth of role tenure. No coding bootcamp graduates, no padded titles.
Foundations under pressure
A 90-minute proctored exam covering data structures, concurrency, memory models, and database internals. Engineer-graded, not auto-graded.
Real work, real review
A 4-hour scoped project mirroring real production work. Two senior engineers review the code, the commits, and the trade-offs.
Architecture under scrutiny
Two live 60-minute sessions designing distributed systems with engineers who shipped at scale. We watch how they reason, not what they recall.
Working with your team
Async writing test, conflict-resolution interview, and a paid trial sprint. We embed the engineer for a week before they're cleared for placement.
Identity and history
Background, reference, and employment verification. Identity confirmed against government ID. Engineers re-verified annually.
What a Heystaff engineer looks like.
The bar shows up on day one.
"Heystaff sent us one engineer. We expected three. She rewrote our payments pipeline in eleven days and we never hired anyone else through anyone else."
"We burned through two agencies and six months before finding Heystaff. Their candidate was in our Slack channel on day one and shipping production code by day four."
"The compliance layer alone saved us twenty hours a week. I went from juggling payroll across three continents to reviewing one monthly invoice. Game changer."
"As a founder, I need senior ICs who don't need hand-holding. Heystaff's vetting is absurdly thorough — every hire has been a net positive from week one."
"We doubled our engineering velocity in a quarter without doubling burn. The platform's time-zone dashboard alone makes the subscription worth it."
"Traditional recruiters send CVs. Heystaff sends working practitioners who've already passed a live system-design review. The difference is night and day."
Vetting questions.
Are these contractors or full-time staff?
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Full-time contractors engaged through Heystaff. We handle the employment relationship, benefits, and compliance; you get day-to-day commitment without the EOR overhead.
Do you allow trial interviews?
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Yes — but most clients hire on the first introduction. We send one candidate, and we record every screening so you can review the reasoning before the call.
How do you prevent ghosting and resignation surprises?
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Our placements have a 99.2% 12-month retention rate. Engineers are paid above-market locally and have a real career path inside the Heystaff bench.
Can you place niche specialists (CUDA, Rust, ML systems)?
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Yes. About 18% of our pipeline is specialists. Hit-rate on niche roles is lower — we tell you up front if the brief needs 21 days instead of 14.
Ready to meet your next engineer?
30-minute calibration call. No commitment, no sales theater.