United States
Northline
Staff backend engineer placed in San Francisco
The search
What changed
We stopped interviewing generalists. The shortlist was four people who had already owned a ledger.
Northline’s payments team had a ledger service with one owner out on leave and a launch date that would not move. The hiring manager wanted a staff engineer who could read the existing design and take the on-call, and the internal pipeline was full of people a level below the seat.
We wrote the brief around the service boundary, the language, and the review culture on that team. The long list was twelve names. The shortlist was four, each with a note on the production system they had owned.
The engineer started sixteen days after the brief. Three months later the service had a second owner, and the manager asked us to open a senior frontend seat on the same product.