In most cases, 5–7 business days from our initial briefing call. Day 1 we understand your requirements. Days 2–3 we present matched profiles. Day 4 you interview. Day 5 we sign the SOW and your engineer has access to your repo. Senior engineers ramp up quickly — that's the point of the seniority requirement.

Every engineer in our network has completed a live technical assessment conducted by a senior SquareShift engineer — not a recruiter. This includes a coding exercise, a system design discussion, and a review of a real project they've delivered. "Senior" means 5+ years of production experience in the relevant technology, demonstrated ability to work with limited supervision, and the communication skills to collaborate effectively with a client team.

We replace them — typically within 3–5 business days. We don't charge you for days where the engineer wasn't performing as agreed. We take mismatches seriously because our reputation depends on placement quality. In practice, mismatches are rare — they happen when requirements shift significantly after onboarding, not because of vetting failures.

Yes — we match timezone overlap as part of the placement process. Minimum 4 hours of real-time overlap with your core team hours is a requirement we apply to all engagements. Our engineers work in whatever tools your team uses — Jira, Linear, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Teams — and adapt to your processes, not the other way around.

Minimum is one month for part-time and full-time dedicated engagements, two months for engineering pods. After the minimum period, engagements run on a rolling monthly basis with two weeks' notice to end or scale. We deliberately avoid long-term lock-ins — the model should work for your business, not trap you in it.

Three key differences. First, we are a technical firm — our vetting is done by engineers, not recruiters. Second, our augmented engineers are backed by SquareShift's full practice (cloud architects, AI specialists, data engineers can be pulled in when needed). Third, we take delivery accountability seriously — if your engineer isn't contributing effectively, we step in and fix it, not just bill you and move on.