$28–40k
per senior hire, paid to an agency
A 20–25% fee on a $160k salary, invoiced whether the person lasts six weeks or six years. You are paying for a search, priced like an outcome.
Two candidates.
Not forty résumés.
AI narrows the field in hours. Then the two of us — engineers who have done the job — interview every shortlisted developer and send you the one or two worth your time, with the assessment and the recording attached.
Run by two engineers — eight years leading platform teams, three startups shipped. No recruiters, no account managers, no third name on the email.
- 5 days
- median time to shortlist
- 2
- candidates per role, maximum
- 6%
- of applicants clear our bar
- 30 days
- free replacement window
02 Why hiring engineers is broken
You are not short on résumés. You are short on judgement you can trust.
Every recruiting model in this market sells you the top of the funnel and leaves the expensive part — deciding whether someone can build the thing — on your calendar.
52 days
median time from open req to signed offer
Two months of the roadmap absorbed by a vacancy — plus the interview hours your staff engineers spent screening people a recruiter never technically assessed.
1 in 9
submitted résumés that survive a technical screen
The agency is optimising for volume because volume is what gets paid. You are the technical filter they are charging you to be.
03 How it works
AI does the searching. Engineers do the judging.
Left: the five days between your brief and two names. Right: the bar those two names had to clear. Most agencies will not show you the second one because there is not one.
- 5 days
- brief to shortlist
- 2 names
- maximum, per role
- 6%
- of applicants clear the bar
The process · Day 0 → Day 5
- 01
Brief the role
Twenty minutes with one of us. Stack, scope, rate band, and what "good" looks like on your team. No account managers.
Day 0 - 02
AI builds the long list
Our matcher ranks our LatAm network on stack fit, seniority signals, time-zone overlap and availability. It never talks to a candidate and it never makes the call.
Day 0–2 - 03
We interview, on camera
Two founding engineers run a systems conversation and a working session in the candidate's real stack.
Day 2–5 - 04
You meet one or two people
The assessment, the recording, the rate, the start date. If neither is right, we go again — the shortlist never grows to five.
Day 5
The bar · Five axes, run by the two of us
- 01
Systems reasoning
A real constraint — 4M events/day, one Postgres box, no budget for Kafka.
Names a bottleneck we did not prompt for.
Recites a reference architecture. Cannot say what breaks first.
- 02
Working session
Ninety minutes in their own editor, in the stack the role actually uses.
Debugs by forming a hypothesis and testing it.
Pattern-matches to a memorised solution, then stalls.
- 03
Code they defend
We read something they shipped and ask why it is that way.
Can name the thing they would do differently now.
No opinion about their own work.
- 04
Written communication
A one-page technical brief written after the session, unedited by us.
Structured, hedges where uncertain, no filler.
Confident about things they did not verify.
- 05
Collaboration signal
How they handle being wrong, and how they scope work they think is a bad idea.
Disagrees with reasoning attached.
Agrees with everything. Or nothing.
04 A real shortlist, redacted
This is everything you get. There is no page five.
D. Ramírez
Senior backend engineer
GoPostgresKafkaAWS
Rebuilt a payments ledger handling 4M events/day. Explains trade-offs before solutions.
Guadalajara, MX8 yrs$58/hr
• Vetted by Andrés
J. Peralta
Staff platform engineer
GoKubernetesTerraform
Ran platform for a 60-engineer org. Strongest on incident design, lighter on product work.
Medellín, CO11 yrs$71/hr
• Vetted by Andrés
05 Where we are
We are new. So we are not asking you to take our word for it.
wepair.works is two engineers who spent years screening agency résumés for a living and to do the screening properly. We do not have a wall of client logos, and we are not going to borrow one. Here is what we put on the line instead.
Read the assessment before you meet anyone
Every shortlist ships with the written assessment and the interview recording. Judge our screen on the evidence in front of you, not on our reputation — we do not have one yet.
Nothing is charged for the search
No fee for the matching, the interviews, or a shortlist you turn down. If we cannot find two engineers we would personally vouch for, you get an honest no instead of a longer list.
You talk to the engineer who interviewed them
No account manager, no sales layer, no handoff. The two people who ran the working session are the two people who own the outcome. That is the whole company.
06 What lands in your inbox
Six attachments. No status call to find out what they say.
Everything below arrives in one email on day five, whether you hire from the shortlist or not.
Written technical assessment
What they were asked, what they built, where they struggled. Two pages, no adjectives.
The interview recording
Watch the working session yourself. Skip to the timestamps we flag.
Rate, notice and overlap
All-in hourly rate, start date, and the hours they keep — before your first call.
30-day replacement
If it is not working in the first month, we re-run the search at no cost.
Contracts and payroll
We employ them locally. You get one invoice, in USD, monthly.
Two founders, no recruiters
The people who interviewed the candidate are the people you talk to.
07 Against the alternatives
The honest comparison, including where we lose.
| Us | Recruiting agency | Offshore marketplace | Job board + DIY | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs the technical screen | Two founding engineers | Nobody | An automated test | Your staff engineers |
| Candidates you review per role | 1–2 | 8–20 | 40+ | Everything |
| Time to first candidate | 5 days | 3–5 weeks | Same day | 4–8 weeks |
| What you pay for | A monthly rate per engineer | 20–25% of first-year salary | A platform margin | Your own hours |
| Paid if the hire fails | No — 30-day replacement | Yes, usually | Partially | n/a |
| Working-hours overlap | 6h+, same continent | Varies | 0–3h typical | Varies |
| You see their code and reasoning | Recording + written assessment | A résumé | A test score | Whatever you run |
| Who you talk to about a candidate | The engineer who interviewed them | An account manager | Support ticket | You |
Where we lose: if you need thirty contractors next quarter, a marketplace will beat us on speed and we will tell you so on the call. We run two interviews a day between us, and that is the constraint we refuse to relax.
08 Pricing
One flat rate
Their pay, local employment, and our margin in a single hourly number you see before the first interview.
Brief a roleNo placement fee
Nothing charged for the search, the vetting, or a shortlist you pass on.
0% of salary
Cancel with 30 days
Month to month after the first 30 days. Convert to a direct hire after twelve months at no cost.
No minimum term
09 Questions
The things you would ask on the call.
Anything not answered here, ask us directly — we answer specifics in writing before you commit to anything.
Two of us, both engineers, both still writing code. Andrés ran platform teams for eight years; Marco has shipped product at three startups. There are no recruiters here and no account managers — if you have a question about a candidate, you are talking to the person who assessed them.
10 Next step
Twenty minutes. Then two names or an honest no.
Tell us the stack, the scope and the rate band. If we have people at the bar you get a shortlist in five days. If we do not, you get told inside 48 hours — no drip campaign, no filler candidates.
No fee to see a shortlist
You pay when someone starts.
No exclusivity
Keep your agency, keep your pipeline.
No account manager
You get the engineer who did the interview.