Engineering hiring moves fast and breaks constantly. Hiring managers report spending 30-40% of their week reviewing resumes, scheduling calls across time zones, and sitting through interviews where candidates freeze or rehash their GitHub README. The bottleneck isn't finding applicants—it's filtering signal from noise at scale. A mid-size engineering team hiring three or four engineers per quarter faces 200+ applications per role, yet most screening loops rely on gut feel, take-home projects that poison experience, or phone screens that tell you nothing about coding under pressure. The result: offers extended to candidates who don't make it past week two, or worse, role stays open for six months. Raffi, an agentic AI recruiter, restructures this entirely. Instead of async assignments or shallow screening calls, Raffi runs every applicant through a structured 30-minute live-coding interview, scored against a rubric you define for the role. Your engineers build the rubric once—testing problem-solving, code clarity, communication during pairing. Raffi conducts the interview, records output, generates a structured report. You review pass/fail decisions backed by evidence, not impression. Time-to-first-offer compresses because you're comparing apples to apples across every candidate. False positives drop because the signal is explicit. Candidates experience a real technical screen, not a bot-farm assessment, so your employer brand doesn't erode. You're left with a ranked list of genuinely qualified engineers ready for final rounds. The payoff: faster hiring, higher quality offers, lower regret.
2,570/mo
Engineering recruiting searches
10-15 min
Per applicant interview
$0
Placement / hire fees
Raffi calls every applicant for a 10-15 min structured interview. Not just the top 5 résumés — every one. Result: nobody good slips through.
Conversational AI interview, rubric-anchored scoring, transcripts you can read. You get a top 3-5 shortlist while competitors are still scheduling first-rounds.
SaaS pricing from $199/mo. No 15-25% of first-year salary, no per-hire kickback. Cancel anytime.
Engineering talent competition remains intense in 2026. Tech-adjacent roles—data engineering, DevOps, backend—see consistent demand outpacing supply in most geographies. Median time-to-fill for senior engineer roles hovers between 60 and 90 days across US and EU markets, with longer cycles in specialized stacks (Rust, Go, Kubernetes). Churn in early-career engineering has plateaued; junior-to-mid transitions are slower as teams consolidate. Teams that moved to async-first or distributed hiring earlier are pulling talent from wider geographies, which compounds scheduling friction and interview fatigue. Passive sourcing—recruiter outreach, LinkedIn inbound—remains expensive and low-signal; most hires still come from active applications, referrals, or niche boards. Hiring managers report fatigue with take-home projects; many candidates drop out mid-project. The upside for teams adopting structured, real-time screening is immediate: compressed cycles, less ghosting, and offer quality that holds post-hire.
Engineering hiring requires live assessment—you can't credibly evaluate problem-solving, communication, or code quality from a resume or portfolio. Unlike generalist roles, a 15-minute phone screen doesn't surface engineering competency. Take-home projects are common but create friction: candidates resent them, top talent deprioritize them, and you learn little about pairing or thinking aloud. Engineering also spans wildly different specializations—backend, frontend, data, infrastructure—each requiring different interview signals. A single rubric doesn't work. Scaling a dedicated technical interview loop across multiple hiring managers is resource-intensive and inconsistent. Raffi addresses this by running structured coding interviews at volume, with rubrics you customize per role or level, reducing the manual load while preserving signal fidelity.
Anchored to real offer data, not estimate aggregates.
Role-specific, behavioral, structured. Same questions for every applicant — the only way to score fairly.
Walk us through a recent feature you shipped. What went wrong during development, and how did you handle it?
What it tests: Maturity and communication in adversity; ownership vs. blame-shifting
You're pairing with a teammate on a bug in production. The fix is obvious to you, but they're suggesting a different approach. How do you handle it?
What it tests: Collaborative problem-solving, ego management, and ability to listen
Given this vague requirement, outline how you'd break it into tasks and estimate effort.
What it tests: Scoping ability, estimation honesty, and clarity in ambiguity
Tell me about a tool, framework, or pattern you've adopted recently that changed how you work. Why did you choose it?
What it tests: Curiosity, pragmatism, and reasoning about trade-offs
Describe a time you disagreed with an architecture or process decision. How did you surface it?
What it tests: Voice and influence; ability to challenge without toxicity
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Engineering hiring teams typically deal with high applicant volume per role, narrow technical bars, and tight time-to-hire windows. Raffi automates the screening loop end-to-end — every engineers applicant gets a structured interview within 24 hours, scored against your rubric. You spend your time on the top 3-5 instead of 60 résumés.
Yes. Raffi generates role-specific behavioral questions tied to your scorecard. For engineering we anchor on the structured questions hiring managers in this vertical actually use (a few samples are listed above). You can edit any of them before they go live.
You and your engineering lead define 4–6 evaluation criteria (e.g., algorithmic thinking, code clarity, communication) and what pass/fail looks like for each. Raffi uses that rubric to score every candidate on the same axes. You can adjust rubrics per level or role.
Yes. You specify the role type, and Raffi runs a live-coding session tailored to that discipline. Each rubric is customized—a backend interview weights system design differently than a frontend one.
You get a structured report with their score against each rubric criterion, plus a recording. You can feedback-loop (e.g., they nailed problem-solving but struggled with explaining trade-offs) or decline confidently, knowing the decision is evidence-based.
Agentic recruiting is recruiting done by an AI agent that takes action on your behalf — not a chatbot or résumé summarizer. Raffi calls every applicant for a structured 10-15 minute interview, scores them against your rubric, and hands you a ranked top 3-5. The work happens autonomously.
Most agencies charge 15-25% of first-year salary as a placement fee — a $90k hire runs $13-22k. Raffi is SaaS at $199-599/mo plus per-action credits, typically landing under $10k/year for a team hiring 12 people. Same shortlist quality, no placement contract.
About 25 minutes to onboard, post your first role, and have Raffi ready to interview applicants. No engineering work, no integration project. Connect your work email, paste a JD, you're live.
Free $25 starter credit. No credit card. Screening live by tonight.