Placement, sourcing, and vetting at the systems layer.
Six discrete engagements, all anchored to the same laboratory discipline. Pick one, combine several, or hand us the whole hiring bar. Every deliverable ships with the sandbox evidence packet that produced it.
Core Kernel Developer Sourcing
Linux kernel, BSD, and custom microkernel engineers with shipped upstream patches. We grade against syscall design, memory model reasoning, and live regression triage inside the sandbox.
Distributed Systems Engineer Placement
Engineers who have owned a control plane, consensus group, or multi-region data path. We assess failure-isolation design, backpressure modeling, and trace literacy under simulated partitions.
Embedded & RTOS Firmware Vetting
Firmware engineers fluent in constrained memory, secure boot, and hard real-time scheduling. Sandboxed against your simulated hardware target.
Performance & Observability SRE
Senior SREs and performance engineers graded on profiler literacy, observability spine design, and runtime instrumentation under live faults.
Security & Cryptography Engineering
Engineers vetted against memory-safe implementation patterns, constant-time arithmetic, key-management topology, and supply-chain assurance.
Fractional Hiring Bar / Loop Design
We rebuild your interview loop, write the rubric, train your interviewers, and operate the sandbox until your team can run it without us.
How we differ from a generic technical recruiter
A traditional technical recruiter is optimized for throughput. They are measured by the number of submissions they push into your applicant tracking system and the speed at which they can move a candidate from sourcing to offer. That optimization works for generalist software roles, where pattern-matching on a resume produces an acceptable signal. It collapses at the systems layer, where the gap between someone who has read about kernel preemption and someone who has fixed a preemption-induced regression in production is enormous and invisible to a non-engineer.
TechHire Labs is optimized for evidence. We measure ourselves on the first-shortlist hire rate — the percentage of engagements that close on a candidate we presented in the first round — and on the number of interview hours we save our clients per requisition. Those two numbers force us to do the slow work up front: build the sandbox, write the rubric, grade real artifacts. The payoff is that you stop spending a month of staff engineer time per hire and start spending an afternoon.
We work with founder-led startups standing up a platform team, with growth-stage companies repairing an interview loop that has stopped converting, and with established engineering organizations that need a temporary hiring bar while their internal interviewers focus on shipping. In every case the contract is the same: we own the vetting, you own the offer, and the sandbox is the source of truth.