TeamCraftSoftware

Hiring a team isn't easy.

Pain Point 1: Finding Staff-Level Engineers is Hard

Hiring experienced, staff-level engineers is one of the hardest challenges in tech. These veterans are rare, in high demand, and often command salaries upwards of $400K/year at companies like Google, Meta, Apple, Netflix, or Amazon. Competing with those giants is tough—especially if your project doesn’t have the complexity, scale, or reputation to keep these engineers engaged.

Yet, these seasoned engineers are critical to the success of a new project. Early architectural decisions can make or break everything down the line, and getting those decisions right requires deep expertise.

If we take on your project, one of our 20+ year veteran Staff Engineers (ex-Apple, ex-Google, ex-Nest, etc.) will lead the entire program. This isn’t someone sitting on the sidelines—they lead the program with a hands-on approach. They meet with stakeholders to define the architecture and roadmap, seamlessly navigating conversations with executives, board members, and engineers alike.

But they don’t just plan—they build. They write the code, set quality standards, conduct code reviews, and cultivate a culture of excellence. If needed, they’ll bring in other TeamCraft experts to help move things forward. At the same time, they hire full-time engineers to staff your in-house team, mentoring them on best practices and preparing them to take full ownership of the product.

Pain Point 2: Interviewing is Hard

Knowing how to identify great engineers is a skill in itself, and it’s one many companies struggle with. If you don’t already have senior technical leaders in-house, how do you even begin to evaluate candidates? What questions do you ask? How do you assess their problem-solving ability, technical depth, and cultural fit?

Our TeamCraft engineers have conducted hundreds of interviews for companies like Apple, Google, and Nest. We know what to look for, how to structure interviews, and how to identify the right candidates for your needs. We can take the guesswork out of the process, ensuring you bring in people who not only meet your technical requirements but also align with your company’s goals and values.

Pain Point 3: Building a Great Team Culture is Hard

Even if you find the right engineers, getting them to stay and excel requires more than competitive pay—it requires a team culture they want to be part of. Engineers thrive in environments where they feel valued, supported, and challenged. Without a strong engineering culture, even the best hires can lose motivation or leave for greener pastures.

We don’t just find and hire engineers—we craft the team culture. From day one, we foster collaboration, establish engineering best practices, and set clear standards for quality and communication. We build teams where engineers feel excited to contribute and grow, creating an environment that attracts and retains top talent.

Pain point 4: Building a High Quality Product is Hard

Software development isn’t easy—it’s a balancing act of priorities. The company needs features yesterday, engineers feel the pressure to deliver fast, and suddenly corners get cut. Tech debt starts piling up: poorly documented code, skipped tests, quick fixes that break later. Over time, the system becomes a tangled mess, harder to maintain and scale. In some cases, the only option is to throw it all out and start over.

The good news? With decades of experience building software at scale, we’ve probably tackled a similar problem before. Our approach isn’t just about delivering quickly—it’s about delivering right. We mentor your team to craft a product that’s both sustainable and elegant, balancing speed with long-term maintainability.

We guide the team in writing clean, well-documented code, setting up CI/CD pipelines for fast and reliable deployments, and establishing best practices to prevent tech debt from creeping in. The result? A product that’s ready to ship quickly and easy to enhance later.

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Here’s How We Solve These Problems.

Step 1: A Veteran Engineer Leads the Way

When we take on your project, one of our 20+ year veterans (ex-Apple, ex-Google, ex-Nest) steps in to lead with a hands-on approach. This leader collaborates with stakeholders to define the architecture, establish the roadmap, and set the tone for the project. They don’t just oversee; they actively build, ensuring every decision is informed by experience and focused on delivering excellence.

Step 2: Building Begins Immediately

Our engineers start coding right away. With professionals from top organizations like Google, Apple, and Nest, we’re passionate about creating new products. At this stage, we define user stories, finalize the architecture, and begin development. For you, this means rapid progress and a foundation built for quality and scalability.

Step 3: Hiring Your Full-Time Team

We begin hiring your full-time team early, often led by our CEO, Byron. Finding the right people is challenging, so we leverage decades of hiring experience to ensure we recruit individuals who align with your vision and culture. This process is deliberate, identifying engineers who can grow with your company and your product.

Step 4: Crafting an Elegant Product Ecosystem

Our work doesn’t stop at the product. We build a complete ecosystem: CI/CD pipelines, backups, recovery processes, documentation, test coverage, and clean, well-organized code. This approach makes onboarding new engineers seamless and ensures your product is easy to maintain and scale.

Step 5: Transitioning to Your Full-Time Team

We hire and train your full-time team directly into your company. These engineers, often a smaller group than the initial development team, become your employees. They are mentored and prepared to take over fully, equipped with the skills and knowledge to maintain and grow your product.

Step 6: Handing Over a Fully Operational Team

Once your new team is running smoothly, we gradually step back, usually after 6 to 12 months. By the time we leave, you have a high-quality, well-trained team capable of taking your product into the future. And while we step back, we’re always available if you need us.

The result?

We deliver more than a working project and a happy team. We deliver a foundation for your future.

We All Win.

You get a great product and a great team -you get a high-quality, elegantly designed solution built on strong engineering principles. Along with it comes a motivated, well-trained team embedded in a culture of excellence. This team isn’t just ready to maintain the product but to grow it, adapt it, and drive it forward into the future.

We get to do what we love - tackle exciting, meaningful projects, building the teams to bring them to life, and mentoring talented individuals. It’s a rare privilege, even in larger organizations, to help shape not just great products but the teams and cultures that sustain them. We're lucky we get to do this.

Your new team gets to level up - they get world-class mentorship and the opportunity to take their careers to the next level.

This is how we define success.

Tell us about the project

Here's how we work.

Free introductory meeting with Byron.

I just enjoy trading good stories, so if you have any, we should chat. If we are also both see potential in working together, we can schedule a deep dive.

Deep Dive.

We take a few weeks to really understand your organization, your roadmap, the personalities involved, and the goals. At the end we deliver a strategy and a team structure for getting you to those goals. You can use this strategy on your own, or you can have us help you build it out.

Build it.

We start building and hiring, usually within a week or two.

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Some Software Development

Principles that We Believe in

Build the Right Thing

Great software starts with understanding what customers truly need—what will make their lives easier and more enjoyable. It’s not just about delivering functionality; it’s about getting close enough to uncover what will genuinely delight users and improve their daily experience.

The Business Is the Point

A solid product strategy aligns with business goals. This includes identifying the right target markets, defining ideal customer segments, and figuring out how the product can stand out from competitors. Of course, there are always constraints—budgets, deadlines, and shifting priorities—that have to be managed to ensure the product is not only valuable but also viable.

Plan to Pivot

Building the right product is never a one-time decision. It’s an ongoing process that demands flexibility for strategic changes and unexpected opportunities. Strong coding practices, like Design for Test and Push on Green, create a structure that makes pivoting and adapting as smooth as possible.

Engineers Should Sleep Well

A great developer experience is being able to confidently make a code change, run tests, push to production, and then go to bed without a second thought. We’ve designed CI/CD strategies that not only ensure happy engineers but also deliver a more reliable and resilient product.

Tests Are Great—Unless They Are Terrible

One of us introduced Test-Driven Development (TDD) and a high-code-coverage culture to a team at Apple, transforming the codebase into something faster, reusable, and far less buggy. But TDD isn’t a religion. Bad tests can slow development and make refactoring a nightmare. Good tests provide confidence without becoming obstacles.

Design for Test, Design for Simplicity

Effective test design doesn’t just catch bugs—it shapes better architecture. Testing interfaces enforce clean abstractions, making the code easier to test, understand, and update. Well-designed tests improve both the product and the process, creating code that’s maintainable and adaptable over time.

Code, Reviews, and Collaboration Tools

We’ve used everything from Atlassian’s Bitbucket and Bamboo to Google’s custom internal tools and GitHub. But tools aren’t the focus—it’s the team’s culture that matters. The right tools help, but a collaborative, open, and communicative engineering culture is what actually drives great work.

Agile and Scrum Are Useful—In Moderation

The Agile Manifesto has its strengths, especially its emphasis on individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Scrum is a great framework, but we customize it for each team and project. Too many meetings can sap coding time, so we strike a balance, keeping teams connected enough to deliver consistently without unnecessary overhead.

Keeping Production Stable

Shipping is just the beginning—it’s not a real product until there’s a pager. Unreliable rollouts or flaky tools can crush morale, so we focus on stability. Practices like CI/CD testing, blue-green deployments, feature flags, monitoring, and gradual rollouts help keep production running smoothly while minimizing disruptions.

Observability, Monitoring, and Metrics

“You get what you measure” is more than a saying—it’s a core principle. We design for observability from the start, using tools like Google’s Borg/Monarch or AWS CloudWatch to define meaningful metrics. This gives insight into performance, uptime, and costs, ensuring control over reliability and efficiency as the product evolves.

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The Business Side

Keeping It Simple

C2C Agreements

We prefer straightforward C2C agreements. As a fully insured and bonded corporation, you pay only for our services—no W2s, no tax headaches. We are never considered employees of your company, but the full-time emploees we bring in are hired directly into your organization. It’s a clean and simple structure that works for everyone.

Monthly Retainer, No Long-Term Commitment

We work on a monthly retainer. This sets clear expectations for all of us, and ensures your project gets our full attention. Our focus is on building strong relationships and delivering success. If it turns out we’re not the right fit, no hard feelings—we’ll part ways professionally. You keep all the code we’ve written and the hires we’ve placed.

Your Hires, No Markups

The full-time people we hire for you join your organization directly. We don’t make money by skimming markup on employees; our job is to build your team and your product. Given that recruiters like to charge 25% of the new hire's yearly salary, it's not much more expensive to hire us.

We Stay Until It’s Done

Building a great team takes time, and we’re here for the entire journey. We don’t leave until the job is done, ensuring your team and product are set up for long-term success.

Beyond Full-Stack:

Tackling Complex Projects

We’ve taken on some unique challenges outside traditional software and full-stack development. If your project has similar complexities, we have the experience to help.

Startups Need to Recognize Revenue

A small startup we worked with was struggling to recognize revenue because a critical hardware component needed to ship to customers. We partnered directly with the COO to craft business strategies and make key decisions regarding the performance and schedule of the hardware development we were leading, ensuring the company could stay afloat.

Getting the Board on Board: Charismatic and Convincing Presentations

We’re skilled presenters who enjoy making complex technical concepts accessible to diverse audiences, from engineers to executives. Byron, for example, once ran parts of an Un-Conference at Google, impressing participants so much that one offered him a job on the spot.

Offshore and Nearshore Contractors

We’ve collaborated with contractors across numerous countries and time zones on a variety of projects. It can be challenging but rewarding. Success often comes when contractors are augmenting a core team of full-time engineers and every pull request is reviewed with a hands-on approach.

Using Independent Design Companies to “Build the Whole Product”

Hiring an outside firm to develop an entire product can work—but only under specific conditions. We’ve seen success when the two companies share a mutual, beneficial goal beyond the contract and when the hiring company has strong technical leadership deeply involved throughout the process. Writing a cheque and hoping a working product shows up later rarely works.

Hardware Vendor Management

Managing hardware development brings its own unique challenges. We’ve worked with vendors to define technical specifications and cost requirements while navigating the mismatched timelines of hardware and software development. Hardware tends to follow a waterfall schedule, which requires careful synchronization to avoid one side blocking the other.

Software Vendor Management

Buying software instead of building it can save time, but it’s rarely as simple as their sales team make it sound. Integrating third-party software often reveals hidden complexities. While "Buy vs. Build" often favors “Buy,” we’ve learned how to navigate the inevitable challenges that come with integration.

Multi-Million Dollar Equipment Purchases

We led the planning, budgeting, vendor negotiations, and purchasing for a multi-million-dollar wireless development lab at Google. Starting with an empty building and a tight timeline, we set up the lab to support the development of what’s now known as Google Nest WiFi, ensuring it shipped on time.

Software Automation and Testing of Real Hardware

We’ve designed RF circuits and radio systems, created new WiFi test stations, automated RF lab benches, and written extensive software to automate performance testing and analysis. These projects often combined deep hardware understanding with software automation, making them both challenging and rewarding.

Compliance and Certification

The FCC had never certified an upgradeable Software Defined Radio—until we changed the rules. Together with a CTO, we helped draft the rules that the FCC adopted and then used them to achieve the first-ever FCC Class 3 Permissive Change to add a new modulation to a radio. (Vanu’s FCC Grantee code: RD6). If you're in a regulated industry and need to pass compliance tests, we've done that.

But Mostly, We Do Software

Our primary expertise lies in building meticulously crafted, high-quality products and leaving you with a motivated, happy, and cohesive team. If your product is complex and involves intersections with any of these specialized areas, we may be uniquely qualified to help guide its development.