Tactical guides for finding, vetting, and onboarding engineers, for the stacks and roles you're actually shipping with.
To hire a HubSpot integration developer in 2026, expect to pay $140k to $220k base for a US senior who knows OAuth 2.0, the v3 CRM API, webhooks, UI Extensions, and serverless functions. Searches take
To hire a head of engineering for an 8 to 30 person startup, expect a 90 to 150 day search, a $250k to $400k US base salary plus 1 to 2 percent equity, and a hiring bar built around four things: writt
To hire a frontend engineer for a B2B SaaS in 2026, screen for three things beyond React fluency: complex form and table UX (the bread and butter of B2B), design-system discipline with Storybook plus
To hire a growth engineer in 2026, expect a $160k to $260k US salary band for a senior, a 60 to 120 day search if you go full-time, and a candidate pool that lives on Substack, in Notion alumni networ
To hire a WebRTC engineer in 2026, expect to pay $180k to $280k base for a US senior (plus equity), $120 to $220 per hour for contractors, and a 60 to 120 day search. The talent pool is tiny: maybe 8,
To hire a product engineer in 2026, screen for three things: full-stack shipping ability (React, Postgres, a real backend), product sense (can they argue back when the spec is wrong), and user fluency
To hire a Slack app developer in 2026, expect to pay $140k to $220k base for a US senior generalist with deep Slack experience (Bolt SDK, Block Kit, OAuth), or $1,500/week on a booking platform like C
To hire developers in Buenos Aires in 2026, expect to pay $3,500 to $7,500 per month for a mid-level engineer (USD, paid via Deel or Wise), tap UBA and ITBA grad networks plus the WorkInBA Slack, and
To hire a Java Spring developer in 2026, screen for Spring Boot 3.x and Java 21+ fluency (virtual threads, records, pattern matching), one production system they own end-to-end, and a clear opinion on
To hire a principal engineer in 2026, expect a 90 to 180 day search, a $350k to $550k US salary band (plus equity), and a candidate pool concentrated in FAANG staff promotions and unicorn senior staff
To hire a Go developer in 2026, start by deciding whether Go is actually the right call (high-concurrency APIs, CLIs, infra tools, gRPC services), then screen for idiomatic patterns (channels, context
To hire a Kubernetes engineer in 2026, expect to pay $180k to $300k base for a US senior, $80 to $180 per hour for contractors, and 45 to 90 days to close a full-time role. Before you start the search
To hire a developer to fix tech debt, hire a senior generalist with low ego and codebase-archaeology skills, not a junior with extra time. Pay $1,500 to $2,000 per week for a 4 to 8 week scoped engage
To hire an MLOps engineer in 2026, screen for one production model-serving stack (vLLM, BentoML, or Modal), one eval pipeline (LangSmith, Braintrust, or homegrown), and at least one observability tool
To hire a developer for a fintech startup in 2026, you need someone with ledger discipline, idempotency instincts, and working knowledge of at least one banking-as-a-service vendor (Increase, Stripe T
To hire a backend engineer for an MVP, prioritize shipping speed over scalability theatre: hire someone who has shipped a full CRUD product with Postgres, Stripe, and an auth provider in under 4 weeks
To hire a Next.js developer in 2026, screen specifically for App Router fluency (not Pages Router), Server Components vs Client Components discipline, Server Actions with proper revalidation, and edge
To hire a Bubble developer in 2026, budget $50 to $120 per hour for freelancers (with $30 to $50 from regional shops in India, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe), look for portfolios that show shipp
To hire a Flutter developer in 2026, screen for Dart 3.x fluency (records, sealed classes, pattern matching), one production state-management framework (Riverpod 2, BLoC, or Provider), and a real opin
To hire a design engineer in 2026, you are looking for the rarest hybrid role in software: a designer who ships production React, owns motion and microinteractions, and treats the last 10% of UI polis
To hire developers in Lagos in 2026, expect senior contractor rates of $2,000 to $15,000 per month (roughly $25 to $90 per hour), source from the Yaba and Lekki tech corridor through Decagon, AltSchoo
To hire a senior staff engineer, accept first that this is a 90 to 180 day search, not a 30-day one. Source from the StaffEng community, Will Larson's network, and ex-Stripe / Shopify / Airbnb alumni
To hire developers in Warsaw in 2026, expect mid-level B2B rates of 18,000 to 28,000 PLN per month, senior 28,000 to 45,000 PLN, and lead or AI/ML up to 99,000 PLN. The dominant model is B2B (flat 12%
To hire developers in Sao Paulo in 2026, expect mid-level PJ contractors at R$15,000 to R$30,000 per month (roughly $3,000 to $6,000 USD) and seniors at R$30,000 to R$55,000 per month (~$6,000 to $11,
To hire on Toptal in 2026, submit a project spec, pay the $500 refundable deposit, and a human matcher introduces 3 vetted candidates within 24 to 48 hours. You then run a 2-week no-risk trial at $60
To hire a QA engineer in 2026, first decide which of the four sub-roles you actually need (test automation engineer, SDET, manual QA, or performance tester), then screen for Playwright plus Cypress fl
Hire a VP of Engineering when you have 15 to 30 engineers, are post-Series B, and your founding engineers are spending more time in 1:1s than in the codebase. Screen for delivery cadence, hiring throu
To hire a Salesforce developer in 2026, screen for Apex with governor-limit fluency, Lightning Web Components (Visualforce is legacy), Salesforce DX with Git, and Agentforce or Einstein AI experience.
To hire a Three.js or WebGL developer in 2026, first decide if you actually need one. Most product teams who say "we need 3D" are best served by Spline plus a regular React engineer at $40-90/hr. Rese
To hire a developer for a B2B SaaS, screen for a specific seven-skill bundle: multi-tenant data isolation, Org/Team/Member modeling, SSO and SCIM provisioning, Stripe seat-based billing, audit logs, R
To hire a Unity or Unreal developer in 2026, pick the engine first based on what you're shipping (Unity for mobile, AR/VR, 2D, and indie; Unreal for high-end 3D, AAA visuals, and sim or viz), then hir
To hire a Chrome extension developer in 2026, screen for shipped Web Store extensions on Manifest V3 (not just any frontend dev who claims the skill), expect $85 to $160 per hour for senior US contrac
To hire a Kotlin Android developer in 2026, screen for Jetpack Compose at scale, Coroutines plus Flow fluency, and a Play Store release they can walk you through end to end. Senior US contractors run
To hire developers in Lisbon in 2026, expect mid-level base salaries of 40K to 60K EUR plus a 26% employer payroll tax and mandatory 13th and 14th month bonuses, with a 3 to 4 month full-time timeline
To hire a Django developer in 2026, screen for Django 5.x fluency on the modern SaaS stack (DRF or Django Ninja for APIs, Celery or django-q for background jobs, django-allauth for auth, django-htmx f
To hire a .NET developer in 2026, accept first that .NET is enterprise-dominant and startup-rare. Senior US contractors run $75 to $180 per hour, full-time base salaries sit at $150K to $200K, and mos
To vet a software developer before hiring, run them through a 4-stage gate: resume signal, portfolio review, a paid 1 to 2 week trial project on real (small) scope, and reference calls. Score each sta
To hire a Solidity developer in 2026, screen for security track record before syntax. The shortlist signal that matters: public Code4rena, Sherlock, or Cantina findings, fluency in Foundry plus Slithe
To hire a Vue.js developer in 2026, expect a 5 to 9 week traditional search because the senior Vue pool is roughly one-quarter the size of React's. Real contract day rates run $85 to $140 per hour for
To hire a Swift iOS developer in 2026, expect senior US contractors at $95 to $160 per hour, full-time salaries from $140k to $185k base, and a six to ten week traditional hiring loop. Swift 6 strict
To hire a TypeScript developer in 2026, screen for strict-mode fluency, advanced-type intuition, and runtime-validation discipline (Zod, io-ts, or Effect Schema). The label "TypeScript developer" has
To hire a React Native developer in 2026, screen for the New Architecture (JSI, Turbo Modules, Fabric) and Hermes profiling, not generic JavaScript. The senior hires you actually want take six to eigh
To hire developers in Berlin in 2026, expect a 3 to 5 month timeline through traditional full-time channels, mid-level base salaries between €70,000 and €95,000, and an employer cost stack (social sec
To hire a no-code developer in 2026, decide first whether no-code is even the right tool. It wins for validation MVPs, internal tools, marketing sites, and simple CRUD. It loses to AI-native code-firs
To hire an AWS engineer in 2026, first decide whether you actually need raw AWS. Most pre-$1M-ARR startups can ship on Render, Vercel, or Cloudflare and skip AWS entirely until compliance or scale for
To hire a developer for a side project, first ask whether you should hire at all. If your scope is one narrow feature and you can write a clear prompt, Cursor and Claude Code will outship a $50/hr con
To hire a data engineer in 2026, first decide if you actually need one. Most pre-Series-A startups should buy the stack (Fivetran or Airbyte for ingestion, Snowflake or BigQuery for storage, dbt for t
To hire a DevOps engineer for a startup, first ask whether you actually need one yet. Below ten engineers, managed services (Vercel, Render, Fly, Sentry, AWS) plus a fractional consultant usually beat
To hire engineers from Eastern Europe in 2026, source country-by-country (NoFluffJobs and Pracuj.pl in Poland, Just Join IT EU-wide, DOU and Djinni in Ukraine, ejobs.ro in Romania), screen for English
To hire a game developer for a startup in 2026, first decide whether you actually need one. Most founders saying "game developer" are building interactive content (Three.js demos, WebGL marketing expe