Engineering Team Building

Start with the org before the people: what does the team need to do in the next 12 months, what roles does that imply, and in what order. We write the job descriptions, set the leveling and Canadian and US market salary bands, design a technical interview that actually predicts on-the-job performance, and run the loop with you. The goal of the first hire is usually a strong generalist or a lead who can help you hire the next two — not the cheapest body you can find.

This is exactly the gap we fill. A CTO who has hired and built teams runs the technical screen and the technical interview for you — code review of a take-home or real PR, a system-design conversation, and a structured scorecard so the decision is evidence-based, not a gut feel. You stay in control of the final hire-or-no-hire call; we make sure you are not bluffed by a confident candidate who can't actually do the work.

No. We are not a recruiting agency, a staffing body-shop, or a contingency recruiter, and we do not place contractors or take a percentage of salary. We help you BUILD a team you own — the org design, the hiring process, the leveling, the interviews, the onboarding, and the engineering culture — led by a CTO who has built teams. When sourcing or executive search is genuinely needed, we point you to recruiters we trust; we don't pretend to be one.

Pricing follows our engagement ladder. The $2,000 Technology Health Check (team & org read) is the entry; ongoing advisory on org design and hiring is from $2,750/month; and an embedded, hands-on engagement where we run the hiring process and stand up your engineering practices is from $8,000/month, scoped to your headcount plan. These are typical averages for planning only — actual cost is assessed per project and scope, and is not a guaranteed price. There are no contingency fees and no per-hire commissions — we share pricing on the first call.

The hiring plan lands in about two weeks. A single strong senior hire typically takes 6–10 weeks from open req to signed offer once the process is real. Building out a first team of three to five engineers — with a working interview loop, onboarding, and engineering practices in place — is usually a three-to-six-month effort. We optimize for hires that stick, not for filling seats fast.

Usually, yes. Teams that stall rarely have a talent problem; they have an org, leveling, or process problem. We assess what's actually breaking — unclear ownership, no code review, no CI, heroics instead of process, or a missing layer of leadership — and fix the system. That often means mentoring and upskilling your existing developers and adding one senior hire, not a clean-slate rebuild.

Concrete, boring, load-bearing things: a code-review standard people actually follow, CI that runs on every pull request, a deployment process that isn't one person's laptop, an agile cadence sized to your team (not enterprise ceremony theatre), clear on-call and incident expectations, and a leveling framework so engineers know how to grow. We set these up so they survive without us.

Yes. We build a leveling framework (what a junior, intermediate, senior, and staff engineer is expected to do), salary bands benchmarked to the Canadian and US markets, and a lightweight performance framework so reviews are fair and based on the level, not vibes. This is what stops good engineers from leaving and keeps your comp spend defensible.