Talent
We put engineers on your team.
Senior engineers on your tools and standards, under your brand when the work is for your client. One block to start, more only if the work earns it.
- Projects
- 9
- Figures published
- 6
- Free first step
- Capacity Note
- Fixed price from
- $25
3 written up on the work page
listed on the work page
built from your open roles and current stack
Overflow Dev Bench
Is this you
The week this fixes.
Sentences we hear from the people who end up sending this practice a bottleneck, and what each one is costing while it stays true.
“We just signed work we do not have the hands for.”
A delivery date that depends on a hiring cycle.
“Two engineering roles open, one recruiter.”
Weeks per seat, in sequence, while the team covers both gaps at once.
“The delivery calendar is full and the next project just signed.”
A quarter of work that needs more hands than the payroll supports.
What a project covers
Scoped to the smallest useful system, judged against a number.
- Overflow dev bench: hourly or weekly blocks, founder-direct, on your tools and standards
- White-label delivery for agencies, with your brand in front of the client
- Defined-scope augmentation: start small, extend only if the work earns it
What that has looked like
- An agency's overflow sprint delivered white-label, on their stack
- Senior hands added to a product team for a defined push
- UI/UX and mobile capacity for a team that cannot wait a quarter to hire
The measures we agree before building
One of these is picked with you at the scoping step, and reported against.
- Delivery throughput per sprint
- Time from need to a productive engineer
- Cost per shipped unit of work against a full-time hire
The bar
How an engineer gets onto your team.
The same bar every time. It is the part of staffing that usually stays vague, so here it is in full.
Step 1: A live technical task, not a CV screen
Candidates get a real problem from the work, with a deadline and the shortcuts ruled out in writing. What the task is depends on the seat: a reverse-engineering problem for a data placement, a schema and a broken migration for a backend one.
Step 2: A phased trial, the second phase paid, under NDA
The first phase screens. The second is paid and runs on the client's actual work, so the decision is made on delivery rather than on interviews.
Step 3: Placement on the client's terms
Biweekly billing or a monthly block, in the client's repository under the client's standards, with the founder still accountable for the work.
Step 4: The bar stays written down
The screening task, the trial phases, and the hand-off are documented per placement, which is what makes the next one repeatable.
No charge, no call
Start with the free one.
Each is a document or a sample, written by the person who would do the work. Send one input, get something back you can act on or ignore.
Free
Capacity Note
Who would sit in the seat, how the first week runs, and how to end it if the fit is wrong.
You send: Your open roles and the current stack. The job ad is usually enough.
You get back:
- The shape of the engineer the work actually needs, against the one the ad describes
- How the first week runs: what they touch, what they ship, who reviews it
- The exit: how you end it, and what you keep if you do
Every free first step across the five practices is listed together, if the problem sits between two of them.
Entry points
Where the work starts, and how it is priced.
Start with one. None of them requires the next one, and each is small enough to judge on its own.
Overflow Dev Bench
Senior hands on your overflow, white-label, weekly invoicing, cancel anytime. Your client never sees us.
$25–$40 · Per hour · weekly invoicing
Try-a-Dev Week
One week, one task, see the work before you decide anything. The cheapest way to find out whether this works for you.
Scoped case by case · One fixed week block · 1 week
Dedicated Engineer
A named engineer on your team, your standups, your tools, month to month. More only when the work earns it, and no placement fee.
$2.4K–$4.8K · Per month, part time to full time
Fractional Ops or Data Engineer
The engineer you cannot justify full time, a few days a month, on the systems that keep needing one.
$1.5K–$3K · Per month
Every price, fixed or by the hour, is agreed before work starts and built the same way: the hours, the tools, and a share of company cost. See how a price is built
The free first step
What the first move looks like.
The first move here is a Capacity Note, written from your open roles and current stack: what is signed, who is on the team, what the gap is, and the smallest addition that closes it.
The work
What this looks like shipped.
A high-volume hotel pricing-data system
169 properties, same day
Engineers placed on the client's data-collection work, each screened against the written bar, on a pipeline carrying more than eight million live requests a month against sources built to block it.
AdultEd Pro: UI/UX and mobile delivery capacity for an adult-education product
Screened React Native developers and a QA engineer supplied as staff augmentation, plus a fixed-price Figma UI/UX design project, for an adult-education mobile app that went live in January 2024; the engagement ran December 2023 to May 2024.
AI Mark Labs: A technical and creative team inside a marketing agency, for a calendar year
15 to 70 clicks per 28-day window
An embedded technical and creative delivery team inside a West Virginia marketing agency through 2024: weekday huddles, weekly reporting on client dashboards and return on ad spend, delivery on its clients' sites, and a measured search window on its own property.
Read the case study
6 more staffing projects
What else we have built in this area, and what changed as a result.
Engagements in this catalogue, described without numbers and, in most cases, without the client: they were built under confidentiality or under another firm's brand. For numbers with sources behind them, see the work page.
Overflow delivery for an agency, under their brand
An agency had signed more than its delivery calendar could hold and did not want to turn work away or start a hiring cycle for a temporary peak.
What we built
- Engineers working inside the agency's repository, standards, and review process
- Communication through their project management, in their client's language
- No Qelv branding anywhere in the deliverable or the correspondence
- A defined end date, with handover written before it arrived
What changed
The agency took the work instead of declining it, and their client never encountered a subcontractor.
Building it, then teaching the client's team to keep it
A team wanted the system, wanted to own it afterwards, and had nobody free to build it first. Bringing in help usually trades one dependency for another.
What we built
- The build, run as a normal engagement against an agreed scope
- Their engineers in the code review from week one, on our work, not on a training exercise
- Documentation and runbooks written for the person who inherits it, not for us
- A deliberate wind-down where they ship the last pieces and we review
What changed
The system landed and the client's own team could change it afterwards, which is the part that usually does not survive a contractor leaving.
Covering a specialist seat while it was being filled
The one person who understood a critical system resigned, and the replacement search had barely started.
What we built
- Immediate cover on the system, learning it from the code and the running behaviour
- Documentation of what was learned, written for the eventual hire
- Maintenance and incident response during the gap
- A structured handover to the permanent hire when they arrived
What changed
The system kept running through the gap, and the new hire inherited notes rather than an archaeology project.
Standing up an AI product team from nothing
A company had committed to an AI product and had no one in-house who had built one.
What we built
- Engineers placed against the specific gaps, rather than a generic squad
- Working alongside the client's own hires as those arrived
- Delivery practice (review, testing, release) established as the team formed
- A defined path to the client's own team owning it
What changed
The product got built while the permanent team was still being hired, instead of after.
Developer capacity for a startup between funding rounds
A startup needed to keep shipping through a period where committing to permanent salaries was not sensible.
What we built
- Developers on defined blocks, scaled up and down against runway
- Work in the client's repository under their standards
- Enough documentation that a pause did not mean starting again
- Honest calls about what to cut when the block was smaller
What changed
Delivery continued through the gap without headcount commitments the company could not yet carry.
Delivery capacity for another software company
A software firm had more signed work than delivery capacity, and its own clients were waiting.
What we built
- Engineers working inside their process, their repository, their review
- Delivery under their brand to their client
- Their SEO and web workstream picked up alongside the build work
- A defined end, with everything handed back documented
What changed
They delivered the committed work on their own timeline without hiring for a peak.
Elsewhere on the site
Read next
- PrototypesLabsWorking prototypes on sample data, including the kind of surface this practice builds. Nothing there is a client system.
- The workThe workCase pages, the systems that could not be named, and every figure with its source.
- The workThe evidence registerEvery record behind the work page, what kind of evidence each is, and what is withheld.
Where to next
The free first step: a Capacity Note.
Send your open roles and current stack. That is all the Capacity Note needs.