Cadence is the booking layer for AI-native engineering. Founders book pre-vetted engineers in two minutes, start a 48-hour trial today, and ship by Monday. Engineers set their own weekly rate, work async-first, and get paid every Friday. Partners earn recurring commission for every founder and engineer they refer.
The traditional engineering hiring loop takes 23 days, costs around $4,700 in recruiter, ATS, and engineer time, and 40% of new hires churn within a year. For early-stage founders that math is a tax on speed. For engineers it is six rounds of interviews to get to a job they will probably leave inside 18 months.
We think the loop should be a booking. Pick a stack. Pick a tier. Get four real engineers on your calendar this afternoon. Try one for 48 hours, free. Keep them on a weekly subscription, or replace them at the end of the week. No retainers, no notice periods, no recruiter middle layer.
Founders pay Cadence weekly. Engineers receive 80% of the gross weekly rate, paid every Friday. Partners earn 10% on referred founders and 5% on referred engineers, recurring, for as long as those people stay on Cadence. Tiers are flat: Junior $500, Mid $1,000, Senior $1,500, Lead $2,000 per week, 40 hours, dedicated. Drop to 20 or 10 hours/week if you need part-time.
Every engineer in our pool ships production code with AI tools as a baseline part of how they work. It is not a filter we apply to a small subset of the pool. It is the floor. Our voice interview and rubric grade fluency with AI assistants, ability to scope with them, ability to stay in the loop on what they generate, and ability to translate that into shipped, reviewed, merged code. If an engineer does not work this way, they do not pass.
We are intentionally small. Engineering, design, operations, GTM. Most of the team has shipped product at venture-backed startups. We are based in San Francisco, Bengaluru, and Lisbon, async-first, with a quarterly week together. Careers if you want to help build this.
Seed-stage. Backed by a small group of operator-investors who have built or run engineering hiring at scale. We are deliberately keeping the cap table tight while we get the unit economics right. More on the investors page.
Founders and engineers: hello@cadence.work. Press and partnerships: partners@cadence.work. Anything sensitive: trust@cadence.work. We reply within one business day.