Remote Recruitment Services for Software Engineering Teams
Hire Nexera runs remote recruitment for software companies hiring permanent engineers remotely. You brief us once and receive three vetted candidates with technical scores, not a folder of resumes pulled off a job board. We work IT roles only, and your first shortlist arrives in five business days.
candidates scored and explained
Key points
- Three scored candidates in five business days, delivered from a pre-vetted pool
- A 90-day replacement guarantee written into the service agreement, with the exclusions published below
- Technical interviews run by working senior engineers, not recruiters
- IT roles only: engineering, DevOps, data, security, and technical leadership
- Timezone overlap confirmed in hours against your working day, not just described as flexible
- One team and one point of contact from the intake call through to the day 90 check-in
What our remote recruitment services include
Every permanent search covers the following:
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A structured intake capturing stack, seniority, required timezone overlap, and the product the engineer will work on
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A shortlist of three candidate profiles, each with a technical assessment score, a written summary of strengths and gaps, and a 60-second video introduction
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All interview scheduling, reminders, and follow-up on both sides
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Reference checks with at least one former manager or client
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Offer support: rate benchmarking against the candidate's market, counter-offer preparation, and help with contract paperwork
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Structured check-ins at day 7, day 30, and day 90 after the start date
Sourcing, advertising, assessments, and interview time all sit inside the engagement. One agreement covers the search from the Day 1 intake call through to the day 90 check-in.
Book a 30-minute intake callWho this service is for
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Seed to Series B software companies with no in-house recruiter.
The CTO is running hiring between sprints and has no time to screen 200 applicants. You get the screening back as three names.
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Product and digital agencies adding permanent capacity.
You need an engineer on your own team for the next two years, not another subcontractor billed per project.
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Mid-market engineering teams with a role stuck open.
The React or DevOps seat has been vacant for two months because the local salary band stopped clearing. Widening the search geographically fixes that, provided the screening holds.
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Companies hiring their first engineer outside their home country.
The classification, IP, and notice-period questions below are the ones that catch teams out on a first international hire.
Remote recruitment
Send us one role. Review a scored shortlist by Friday
Tell us the stack, the timezone overlap you need, and the seniority.
- Three scored candidates
- Five business days
- 90-day replacement guarantee
When we are not the right choice
Five models compete for this problem, and picking the wrong one costs a quarter. Here is the honest comparison, including the cases where we lose.
| Model | How it works | Best for | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruitment agency (this service) | We find and vet, you employ directly | Permanent hires you want on the team long term | You own the employment relationship and payroll |
| Talent marketplace | A self-serve pool you browse and select from | Speed, when you know exactly what you need | Candidates are often shared across clients, and the rate carries a permanent platform margin |
| Employer of record | A third party legally employs the person for you | Hiring in a country where you have no legal entity | A monthly per-employee cost that never ends, and most do not source candidates |
| Staff augmentation | We employ, you direct the work | Adding capacity without headcount approval | Costs more than a direct hire over a two-year horizon |
| RPO | We run your hiring function end to end | Ten or more hires per quarter | Heavier than you need below that volume |
If you need one or two permanent engineers, use an agency. If you need ten or more hires this quarter, ask us about RPO, because individual searches stop making sense at that volume. If you need someone for six weeks, contract or temporary staffing is the right shape.
How it works
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01
Intake call, Day 1.
Thirty minutes. Alongside the role requirements, we ask what your last unsuccessful hire got wrong, because that tells us more than the job description does.
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02
Database first, then active sourcing, Day 1 to 2.
We search our own vetted pool before opening a new search. Candidates clear a portfolio and repository review and a screening call before they go further. Where a vetted engineer in the right timezone already sits in the pool, the shortlist can land inside 48 hours.
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03
Technical assessment, Day 2 to 3.
A take-home task built on your stack, marked on structure, naming and error handling, and on how clearly the submission explains itself, since that is how this person will hand work over.
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04
Technical interview, Day 3 to 4.
Forty-five minutes with a senior engineer, covering a code review, one system design discussion, and one scenario problem.
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05
Shortlist delivered, Day 5.
Three scored profiles, each carrying the overlap figure, our reasoning, and a written note on where that candidate is weaker.
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06
Your interviews, offer, and signature, Week 2 to 4.
We coordinate scheduling and debrief with you after each round. Brief to signed offer runs two to four weeks, and most of that is your interview loop and the candidate's notice, not our sourcing.
Distributed hiring
Overlap in hours, not in promises
We record how many hours a candidate will genuinely be online against your working day.
- Timezone overlap confirmed
- Written communication screened
- Engineer-led assessment
How that compares
Time to first qualified candidates.
How much overlap you get, by region
We do not recruit from one fixed country. You tell us the overlap you need and we source into it, so the question worth answering first is what each region actually buys you.
| Engineer region | Working day | Overlap with London | Overlap with New York | Overlap with Dubai |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin America (Colombia, Mexico) | UTC-6 to UTC-5 | 3 to 4 hours | 8 to 9 hours | None |
| Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil) | UTC-3 | 6 hours | 7 hours | 2 hours |
| Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania, Serbia) | UTC+1 to UTC+3 | 6 to 8 hours | 1 to 3 hours | 6 to 8 hours |
| Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Jordan, UAE) | UTC+2 to UTC+4 | 5 to 7 hours | 0 to 2 hours | 7 to 9 hours |
| South Asia (Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka) | UTC+5 to UTC+5:30 | 3.5 to 4 hours | None | 7.5 to 8 hours |
| Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Philippines) | UTC+7 to UTC+8 | 1 to 2 hours | None | 5 to 6 hours |
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A New York team gets close to a full working day from Latin America and a morning from Eastern Europe.
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A London team can work with almost anything between Latin America and South Asia.
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A Gulf team gets the strongest match from South Asia and Eastern Europe and should not be hiring in Latin America.
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Where the number lands below two hours we will say the hire is likely to fail on collaboration before we take the brief.
What we check that an office hire never needs
Remote hires rarely fail on technical skill. They fail on the things nobody asked about during the interview.
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Overlap hours, written on the shortlist.
"Flexible hours" is not an answer, it is a way of avoiding the question. We ask what hours the candidate is actually at a desk in their own timezone, convert that against your working day, and put the number on the shortlist. Four hours carries a normal product team. At two hours you lose standup and same-day code review, and seniority does not compensate for it.
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Writing, judged on work they have already shipped.
On a distributed team the pull request is the meeting. Where a candidate has public repositories we read their PR descriptions and issue comments before the interview rather than the prose on their resume. A history of two-word PR titles tells you what code review with this person is going to feel like.
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Worker classification.
Engaging an engineer as a contractor when the working relationship resembles employment creates real exposure: back taxes, social contributions, and in some jurisdictions permanent establishment risk for your company. We raise it at intake and tell you when an employer of record is the safer structure.
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IP assignment that holds in the candidate's jurisdiction.
An assignment clause written for your home market does not carry automatically everywhere. Moral rights persist in some jurisdictions regardless of contract wording, and others require IP transfer to be specified separately rather than folded into employment terms. Have your counsel review the template once, then reuse it.
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Candidate data handling.
In several jurisdictions, candidate resumes count as personal data and cannot sit in a spreadsheet indefinitely. We hold candidate records with consent and a defined retention period, and we can delete on request.
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Whether they have actually worked remotely before.
Remote-curious is not remote-experienced. We ask how long their longest fully remote role ran, who they reported to, and how decisions reached them when nobody was in a room. An engineer whose only remote stretch was a lockdown at a company that has since returned to the office is a different risk from one who has worked this way for four years.
What we need from you
Searches that land in five days start with these four answers. The ones that stall are almost always missing the second.
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The overlap window you need, in hours.
Not a country, and not a continent. Tell us how many hours you need this person online alongside your team, and which hours those are. That single number opens or closes whole regions before we source a profile, and it is the input clients most often leave blank.
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Who will contract and pay the person.
Your own entity, a contractor agreement, or an employer of record. This decides which countries are open to you and it changes the offer we can put in front of a candidate. If you have not decided, say so on the intake call and we will work through it there instead of at offer stage.
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Interview slots that work in their timezone, not only yours.
A 4pm slot in New York is midnight in Karachi. Give us two windows a candidate eight hours away could reasonably take, and keep them open through week two. Strong engineers sit in two or three processes at once, and the slow process is the one they drop.
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A pay range, in one stated currency, that you will actually pay.
We benchmark against the market the candidate lives in, not yours, and tell you at intake if the range sits 15% or more below it. Name the currency and say who absorbs the conversion, because a number that shifts between the offer and the first payslip costs you the hire.
Contractor, employer of record, or your own entity
We do not act as your employer of record and we do not run payroll. You contract the engineer directly, so the structure is your decision, and it is cheaper to make it before the search than at offer stage.
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Contractor agreement
Fastest to sign, and the usual choice for a first hire in a new country. It holds up when the engagement genuinely looks like contracting: the person sets their own hours and methods, invoices you, and sits outside your management line. Where it stops holding up is the classification point above, and that is the part most companies find out about late.
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Employer of record
A third party employs the person locally and bills you monthly. Use it when you want an employee rather than a contractor in a country where you have no entity, and when the classification risk is real rather than theoretical. Two things to price in: the per-employee fee runs for as long as the person stays, and an employer of record does not find the person for you.
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Your own local entity
Worth it once you have a cluster of hires in one country, and rarely before. Setup and ongoing compliance cost more than an employer of record for the first few people and less once the headcount builds. Most companies cross over somewhere in the mid single digits, but it moves a lot by country, so price both routes before you commit to either.
After the offer: onboarding and what the guarantee covers
We run an onboarding checklist with both sides 48 hours before the start date: repository and tool access, equipment, first-week expectations, and the communication norms your team already uses. We then check in at day 7, day 30, and day 90.
Book a 30-minute intake callThe 90-day replacement guarantee works as follows. If the engineer resigns, or you end the engagement for performance or fit reasons, within 90 days of their start date, we run the search again and place a replacement at no additional cost.
Two things fall outside it, and we would rather say so here than in a clause you find later. The guarantee does not cover a role eliminated through restructuring or a change in your funding position, because that is not a hiring failure. It also does not cover a placement where the scope of the role changed substantially after the start date, since we would be replacing against a brief we never worked to. In both cases we will still run the new search on reduced terms, agreed before we begin.
Why companies choose Hire Nexera
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We recruit IT only.
No marketing, no finance, no operations. Recruiting technology only is why a 20-minute call is enough to separate a mid-level React developer from a senior one, and why a Go position never gets a Node.js profile from us. Specialists who broaden their scope lose the technical judgment that made them useful to engineering buyers.
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Cross-border hiring handled in one place.
Most specialist firms work a single region, so a second entity means a second agency and a second process. We run searches across the markets we cover under one agreement and one point of contact.
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Engineers run the technical assessment.
The interview is run by a working senior developer in the candidate's own stack, and that engineer writes the score you read. Recruiters coordinate; they do not grade.
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Three candidates, scored and explained.
A shortlist of twelve is a research project, and it usually sits unopened for a week.
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One point of contact.
You deal with one person from the intake call through to the day-90 check-in, in your timezone, not a handover chain. No handoff to an account team.
How to evaluate a remote recruiting agency
Five questions separate the firms worth briefing from the ones forwarding you LinkedIn profiles. Most remote recruiting companies answer three of them comfortably and hedge on the other two. Ask us the same five.
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Who conducts the technical interview, and what is their background?
If a recruiter runs it rather than a working engineer, the technical score means nothing. Ours is a 45-minute session run by a senior developer in the candidate's stack.
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What is the guarantee, and what voids it?
Nearly every agency advertises 30 or 90 days. Few will name the exclusions before you sign. Ours are set out in the guarantee section on this page.
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How many candidates will I see, and how were they filtered?
A shortlist of twelve means the filtering was left to you. We send three.
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What sits inside the engagement, and what gets billed separately?
Assessment costs, advertising, and interview time are common add-ons elsewhere. Ask for the answer in writing.
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Which markets can you actually hire into?
Ask directly rather than reading the map graphic, and ask whether one team covers all of them or the work gets handed between offices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Start a search
Send us one role. Brief us on Monday and review a scored shortlist by Friday.
Book a 30-minute intake call