How We Vet Senior LatAm Engineers: Founders Run It

Most agencies sell you on access to “thousands of vetted engineers.” If you’ve ever been on the buyer side of one of those, you know the dirty secret: vetted usually means “we read their resume and they speak English.” Three calls in, you’re interviewing the same junior they marketed as senior.

We screen differently, and the difference isn’t a pass rate — it’s who is in the room. The founders run all three interviews themselves. No recruiter pre-screen, no scorecard handed down from someone who has never shipped the stack in question. That’s also why we place few engineers rather than many: this doesn’t scale, and we’ve stopped pretending it should. Here’s exactly what we do.

We used to publish a pass-rate figure here. We removed it — we don’t keep an audited applicant funnel, so the number wasn’t something we could defend, and “under 5%” is a claim every competitor makes for the same reason: it costs nothing to assert.

The structure matters more than the difficulty. We run every candidate through the same three stages with the same rubric, which is the core of structured interviewing — the hiring practice with the strongest supporting evidence, and the one most technical loops quietly skip.

Stage 1 — Live coding in your stack (90 minutes)

We don’t do leetcode. Inverting binary trees has nothing to do with shipping production software in 2026.

Instead, we run a 90-minute paired coding session on a problem representative of your actual codebase. If you ship a Next.js + Postgres SaaS, we test on Next.js + Postgres. If you ship a Go microservice mesh, we test on Go.

What we’re watching for:

• Debugging instinct. Do they reach for console.log or do they reason about state? Both are fine — what’s not fine is freezing under pressure.
• Trade-off conversations. When we ask “should this be a join or a separate query?”, do they consider lock contention, payload size, query plan? Or do they pick the answer that sounds smartest?
• Comfort with ambiguity. Real problems come with missing context. We deliberately leave gaps. The wrong move is to assume; the right move is to ask.

We’ve watched senior engineers from FAANG companies fail this stage because they were used to having product specs handed to them. We’ve watched indie developers from Caracas pass it brilliantly because they’re used to making product calls themselves.

For the actual questions and the red flags behind each stage, see our senior interview question set.

Stage 2 — Systems-design conversation (60 minutes)

A senior engineer’s value compounds through architectural judgment. Junior engineers ship features. Senior engineers prevent the next architectural mess.

We pick a real system from the candidate’s recent work and ask them to walk us through it: data model, scaling decisions, failure modes, what would they change if they started over. We probe for production scars.

The pattern that gives us highest confidence: a candidate who can name a specific decision they regret, explain why, and walk us through how they’d handle it differently now. That’s a person who’s shipped real systems, watched them break, and learned. The pattern that fails fast: vague claims of “scaled to millions of users” with no specifics.

Stage 3 — Communication and ownership (45 minutes)

This is the stage that fails the most candidates who cleared the first two. We’re not putting a percentage on it for the same reason we dropped the pass rate: we don’t track it in a way we’d defend in public.

We ask:

• Tell me about a time you disagreed with a tech lead’s decision. How did it resolve?
• What’s a piece of code in production right now that you wish you’d written differently?
• How do you write a status update for a project that’s running 2 weeks late?

What we want to hear: clarity, accountability, async communication chops, and the ability to push back diplomatically. Senior engineers who can’t disagree with leadership aren’t senior. Senior engineers who can’t write a clear two-paragraph status update will struggle with US clients.

Why this matters for you

Toptal’s vetting is broad — they place from 100+ countries with English as a secondary screen. Andela has scaled into a marketplace where you’re effectively sourcing yourself. We’re a focused boutique: the founders interview every senior we place. We work primarily with LatAm talent we know personally or have referrals for. Our pricing reflects no public-company overhead.

The result: the engineers we place stay. We deliberately don’t publish a retention percentage — our sample is too small for one to be meaningful — but the mechanism is the point, and it’s checkable. They ship faster because the gap between “we hired them” and “they’re contributing meaningfully” is days, not months.

If that’s the kind of engineering hire you want for your team, we match candidates within 14 days. It’s the same bar behind our Hiring as a Service model, and part of why nearshore LatAm beats offshore on more than cost.