Company · · 4 min
Hiring senior engineers in 2026
Where good engineers actually come from, and how we filter without breaking ourselves.
The honest version
We’ve hired ~25 senior engineers in three years. Our funnel looks nothing like LinkedIn would have you believe.
What works
- Network. ~70% of our hires came from someone we already work with vouching for them.
- Open-source breadcrumbs. A handful of really good engineers showed up in our PR queue or in someone’s substack comments.
- Conference talks. Twice we ended up working with people who gave a talk we attended.
What doesn’t work
- Job boards. We post on them. They generate volume, not signal.
- Take-home tests. Most senior people refuse them. The good signal is past work, not a four-hour test.
- Whiteboarding. Theatre, not assessment.
The interview itself
Two conversations, two hours total. The first is technical depth on something they built. The second is collaborative debugging on something we’re actually stuck on. By hour two we know.