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Technology & Engineering Recruitment — TopHeads

AI-matched hiring for engineering leaders and senior individual contributors — VP Engineering, principal engineers, platform, infrastructure, hardware and embedded. Matching on real technical depth, not keyword bingo.

Engineering hiring has an unusually bad signal-to-noise problem, because the vocabulary is both dense and gameable. A résumé containing Kubernetes, Terraform and Go tells you almost nothing about whether someone has actually carried a pager for a system that could not go down, or has only ever consumed a platform another team built. TopHeads reads for that difference. It weighs the scale a system ran at, the failure modes the person owned, whether they built the abstraction or used it, and how their responsibility changed across roles — and then explains, in writing, why a given candidate cleared or missed the bar you set.

That matters most at the two ends of the seniority range where conventional filters are worst. Engineering leadership — VP of Engineering, head of platform, director of infrastructure — is a role where the technical record and the organisational record have to be assessed together, and where a filter tuned to either one alone produces a useless list. Senior individual contributors have the opposite problem: principal and staff engineers frequently have flat titles for years while their scope quadruples, so title-based screening buries exactly the people you most want to talk to.

The same applies outside software. Hardware, embedded, mechanical, electrical, manufacturing and test engineering are all first-class here, and they are fields where the meaningful credentials — the process node worked at, the certification regime, the safety standard a design had to clear — are the kind of detail a generic recruiting tool flattens into nothing. If you are hiring for one of those seats, describe the constraint that actually governs the work, and the matching will treat it as the requirement it is.