How we hire great engineers
Our secret? We already know them.
Twenty-five years of relationships with senior engineers: backend, frontend, full-stack athletes, AI, platform, the people who lead them. When you give me a search, I’m not searching. I’m texting people I know about a seat I understand.
Who I find
Senior technical talent where fit matters more than keywords.
Backend & systems
Ruby, Python, Go, Java, Elixir, Rust. The engineers who keep everything running, even at 3 a.m.
JavaScript & frontend
React, Vue, Angular, Node, TypeScript. The people who make it work and make it beautiful.
Full-stack & staff+
Engineers who own entire features and make architecture decisions. The ones you build a team around.
Platform & AI/ML
Cloud, DevOps, SRE, data engineering, ML infrastructure. The layer everything else depends on.
Engineering leadership
Tech leads, managers, directors, VPs. The people who set culture, direction and pace.
Your weird role
“Backend, but can talk to clients, and maybe manage two juniors.” I get it. Half my searches don’t fit a neat box.
How it works
You meet people. Not a stack of résumés.
Tell me what you actually need.
What are you building? What’s the culture? Which traits matter in an engineer, and which should be avoided? The honest version, not the job description.
I think of someone.
I select and pre-screen people with the qualities you’re after. I’m an engineer too, so I can vet them technically. Challenge me to find a recruiter with a higher hit rate.
I bring them to life, just for you.
A custom-written vignette about each candidate, a code test if you want one, and the résumé. By the first interview you’ll feel like you already know them. Warm intros within 72 hours.
How an engagement works
You pay for performance. Nothing else.
Most recruiting contracts hide the risk in the fine print. I’d rather say it out loud. And trying me costs you an hour, not a quarter: you’ll meet a handful of people who fit, not a stack of résumés to sort.
- Contingency. You pay when your hire starts. No retainer, no exclusivity.
- A 100-day guarantee, the first no-cliff guarantee in the industry. If it doesn’t work out, you’re covered.
- It pro-rates, one percent a day, so there’s no hard decision cliff at the end of the period.
- The fee is due net 10 from the start date; paying on time is what keeps the guarantee in force.
- Nothing is submitted without the engineer’s consent, and every candidate knows who you are before saying yes to an intro.
The percentage is a conversation. Fifteen minutes and you’ll have it.
Brian or not Brian
Spoiler: if you’re reading this, probably Brian.
Life’s too short for bad recruiter matches. Let’s see if this one fits.
I’m great when
- You need senior engineers and the job boards are sending noise.
- Your hiring manager is drowning in screening calls that go nowhere.
- You want to meet three great people, not sort through fifty résumés.
- The role is critical and you want a recruiter who actually understands engineering.
Probably not the right fit
- You need junior developers. The job boards actually do fine with that.
- You want volume, not curation. A bigger firm can help.
- Budget is the only thing that matters. The cheapest recruiter gets the cheapest candidates, every time.
- You’re not sure what you need yet. Actually, call me anyway. I can help you figure it out.
The company I keep
Twenty-five years alongside some of the best startups, and the people inside them.
It has been a privilege to watch them grow: the hiring managers and CTOs who built the teams, and the engineers who joined them. The companies keep calling, and so do the engineers.
Engineering teams I’ve hired for
- Coinbase
- Venmo
- Zillow
- MasterClass
- Labcorp
- Blue Apron
- Doximity
- Handshake
- YNAB
- Splitwise
- Kajabi
- UserTesting
- Litmus
- Guru
- Kolide
- DataGrail
- Close
- Mutiny
- Bold Penguin
- Tripleseat
- Man Crates
Brian is by far the best recruiter I've worked with. When I met Brian it was as a job seeker, and he helped me find a position that met all my needs very quickly and with little fuss. The first company he introduced me to is the one I ended up working for. I've been at the same company now for over 5 years, moving from Senior Rails Engineer to Director of Engineering. As a manager I can say without hesitation that the best members of my team are the ones that have come through Brian and Mirror Placement, and we continue to count on him for top notch talent whenever we're hiring.
Brian helped me get a great position at a reputable, profitable company with a great engineering culture. He understood and took into account my skill set, career goals, and personal/family situation to find an organization that was a great fit for me. Among other things, what sets Brian's company apart is that they understand tech and business and aren't just trying to churn through engineers to place in positions. They take the time and effort to find a good mutual fit for the long term. I wholeheartedly recommend him and will use him if I ever need to again. Thanks Brian and Mirror!
Great! Prior to working with Brian I'd only have negative experiences working with 3rd party recruiters. Generally speaking they didn't seem to understand the position they were trying to fill - basically just looking at buzzwords on resumes and matching them to job descriptions. From my experience, Brian understands the different technologies and what sort of candidates companies are looking for. During the interviewing and negotiating process Brian had useful advice on how to approach certain things with the company I was hired by.
Developer roots
I build software too.
Mirror was born out of Atlantis Technology, my software development agency, where we’ve built products and dev teams since 2001 and run Rails since version 0.9.5. When your recruiter has spent twenty-five years inside engineering teams, not just recruiting for them, the conversation is just different.
Talk to Brian
Tell me what you need. I’ll think of someone.
Skip the formal job description. The more honest you are about the seat, the stack and the room, the faster a warm intro shows up. If I can help, great. If not, I’ll point you in the right direction.
I read these myself. Jonathan Soo Hoo, my partner at Mirror, does the first outreach on some searches; if you hear from him, that’s why.