Software hiring is broken in a specific way. Not in an “industry has problems” way. In a structural way that wastes weeks of every founder's and every engineer's life. We are building Cadence because we believe the loop should be a booking.
The average startup hire takes 23 days from job post to signed offer. Add another two weeks for notice and ramp and you are at 37 days before the engineer ships their first useful PR. Founders pay this in calendar time. Engineers pay it in cycles of unpaid prep, take-homes, and panel interviews. Recruiters pay it in churn. Nobody wins except the ATS vendors.
Anything that takes 37 days at a venture-backed startup is broken. The loop has to compress.
A 2026 engineer who is fluent with AI tools is meaningfully different from a 2022 engineer. Throughput is higher. The work shifts from typing to scoping, reviewing, integrating, and judging. The vetting that worked in 2022, leetcode, take-homes, six rounds of behaviorals, was already a poor signal then. It is a worse signal now.
We grade for the new shape of the job: can you prompt, can you stay in the loop on what you generate, can you ship reviewed code that actually runs in production. That is the floor. Everyone in the Cadence pool meets it.
Early-stage software work is bursty. You need a senior React engineer for the next four weeks. You need a Postgres specialist for two. You need an ML engineer for the data migration. None of those should be a 37-day hire and a permanent headcount line. They should be a booking.
Booking is what hotels solved. Booking is what Uber solved. Booking is what every meaningful coordination problem of the last 30 years has converged on. Software work is the one place where we still pretend the only unit is a forever full-time hire.
The most honest signal of fit is what an engineer ships in the first 48 hours. Not a take-home. Not a panel. Real work, against real context, with real review. We make that the trial: 48 hours, free, on the founder's actual codebase. If it works, the engineer rolls onto a weekly subscription. If it does not, both sides walk away clean.
Two-week net 30 is a relic of paper invoices. Engineers should be paid for the work they shipped this week, this week. We pay every Friday, automatic, 80% of gross to the engineer. That is what makes Cadence work for the people doing the actual building.
Most engineering hires happen because someone trusted recommends someone trusted. The economics of that recommendation should not be “a finder's fee, once”. It should be recurring, for as long as the relationship lasts. Our partners earn 10% on every founder they refer, every week, forever. That is the right price for a routing layer that creates real value.
Pricing is on the page. Engineer pool is on the page. Replacement policy is on the page. Tiers are on the page. We do not believe in “contact sales” for a $500-a-week subscription. The whole product is on the front page, and you can book in two minutes without talking to anyone.
Stop recruiting. Start shipping. Book your first engineer, or apply to join the pool.