How We Vet Senior LatAm Engineers (and Why Less Than 5% Pass)

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. Less than 5% of applicants pass our process — not as a gatekeeping flex, but because the cost of a bad placement (yours, not ours) is enormous. Here’s exactly what we do.

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.

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 filters out 60% of candidates who passed the first two.

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 94% retention at 12 months (industry average is 67%). 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.