Ambacia is a Zagreb-based IT recruitment agency that recruits across Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia for startups building first engineering teams, corporations, and international companies opening Croatian offices. It also offers technical and psychological assessments and employer-of-record services.
Specialty
Engineering Recruiting: Startup Recruiting Firms
Compare engineering recruiting firms for startups, from Terminal's distributed teams to Coastal Recruiting's first technical hires, with screening questions to ask.
47 of the 210 recruiting firms for startups tracked on Startup Recruiting Firms publish Engineering Recruiting as a specialty, as of October 29, 2026. The featured partner, Recruitmint, is pinned first when it qualifies; every other row is alphabetical, unpaid, and drawn from public information.
Engineering recruiting firms on this list specialize in sourcing and closing software engineers, rather than running general executive or GTM searches. Terminal works with growth-stage companies building distributed engineering teams, including nearshore hiring in Latin America, Canada, and Europe. Coastal Recruiting focuses narrowly on the first wave of technical hires at early-stage, VC-backed startups — the engineers who join before a company has an internal recruiting function. Several firms tagged under Tech Recruiters on this site also do engineering-specific work but describe themselves more broadly, so check a firm's full specialty list rather than relying on a single tag. What separates a good engineering recruiter from a generalist is usually technical screening depth: whether they can evaluate a candidate's actual coding ability and system-design thinking, or whether they're passing through resumes that match keywords. Ask any firm you're evaluating who screens technical candidates before they reach you, and whether that person has an engineering background themselves. Region matters too — a recruiter's network is usually strongest close to where they're based.
Which recruiting firms for startups do engineering recruiting?
Advertiser disclosureFeatured partner pinned first and labelled; every other company is listed alphabetically. No paid placement.
| Company | Headquarters | Specialties | Size | Best for | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Ambacia
Balkans, Europe
|
Zagreb, Croatia | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Apollo Technical
North America
|
Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Large | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Averity
North America
|
New York, USA | — | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Brainspotting
Europe
|
Bucharest, Romania | — | RPO | Visit | |
|
Cadre
North America
|
San Francisco, USA | Boutique | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Carex Consulting Group
North America
|
— | Boutique | Talent Advisory | Visit | |
|
Chasen Talent
North America
|
— | Boutique | Early-Stage Startups | Visit | |
|
Clutch Talent
North America
|
— | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Coastal Recruiting
North America
|
Los Angeles, USA | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
EngGame
Europe
|
England, United Kingdom | Boutique | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Fabric Staffing
North America, Remote/Global
|
— | — | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
FindIT Recruitment
Balkans
|
Belgrade, Serbia | — | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Forwardly Partners
North America, Latin America
|
— | Boutique | RPO | Visit | |
|
Golden Gate Recruiting
North America
|
San Francisco, USA | Boutique | Early-Stage Startups | Visit | |
|
HC Solutions
Balkans, Europe
|
Belgrade, Serbia | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
High Slope Recruiting
North America, Remote/Global
|
— | Boutique | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
KORE1
North America
|
Irvine, USA | — | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
LatamCent
Latin America, North America
|
— | — | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Lupa Hire
Latin America, North America
|
— | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
LuRecruiter
Latin America, North America
|
Lima, Peru | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Mavila Consulting
Latin America
|
Brazil | Boutique | Executive Search | Visit | |
|
Merot
Balkans
|
Skopje, North Macedonia | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Near Horizons
Latin America, North America
|
— | — | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
nSky Solutions
Remote/Global
|
— | Boutique | Talent Advisory | Visit | |
|
Nxt Level
North America
|
— | Boutique | Executive Search | Visit | |
|
PeopleFirst Talent Partners
Latin America, North America
|
Buenos Aires, Argentina | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Recruits Lab
North America
|
— | — | Embedded Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Refery
North America
|
— | — | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
RemoteEngine
Remote/Global
|
— | — | RPO | Visit | |
|
Richard Wheeler Associates
Europe, Remote/Global
|
Newbury, United Kingdom | Boutique | Early-Stage Startups | Visit | |
|
Rocket
North America, Remote/Global
|
San Francisco, USA | Mid-size | Executive Search | Visit | |
|
Schultz Staffing
North America
|
— | Boutique | Fractional Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Shields Group Search
North America, Latin America
|
New York, USA | Boutique | Executive Search | Visit | |
|
Solara Talent
North America
|
New York, USA | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
SSGOPS
North America
|
San Francisco, USA | Boutique | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
StartupTAP
North America
|
Los Angeles, CA, USA | — | Talent Advisory | Visit | |
|
TalentMinted
Europe
|
— | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Talento Consulting AI
North America, Europe
|
Los Angeles, USA | Boutique | RPO | Visit | |
|
Teamcubate
Balkans, Europe
|
— | — | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
Tech StaQ
Europe
|
Barcelona, Spain | Boutique | RPO | Visit | |
|
Terminal
North America, Latin America
|
San Francisco, USA | Mid-size | Embedded Recruiting | Visit | |
|
That Recruitment Company
Europe
|
Amsterdam, Netherlands | Boutique | Tech Recruiters | Visit | |
|
The Search Experience (TSE)
North America, Remote/Global
|
San Francisco, USA | Boutique | Early-Stage Startups | Visit | |
|
The Startup Talent Agency
North America
|
— | — | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Turmero Talent
North America
|
— | Boutique | Engineering Recruiting | Visit | |
|
Venture People
Latin America, North America
|
— | — | Executive Search | Visit | |
|
Zytheq
North America
|
San Francisco, USA | Boutique | Engineering Recruiting | Visit |
Showing 10 of 47 companies
All 47 listed
47 shownApollo Technical is an engineering, IT, and supply-chain recruiting firm with offices across the US Southeast, Texas, and the Midwest, placing candidates from startups through Fortune 500 companies in specialties spanning software engineering, controls engineering, and renewable energy.
Averity is a New York City technical recruiting agency specialized in software engineering, data science/engineering, and DevOps/security hiring, running dedicated recruiting teams for each niche within the NYC tech market.
Bucharest-based technology recruitment firm, founded in 2001 as Romania's first specialised tech recruiter. Offers executive search, per-role search, time-boxed recruitment sprints, Recruitment as a Service (embedded recruiters, also known as RPO), contracting, Employer of Record and build-operate-transfer programs, plus annual talent-intelligence reports. Delivers across Europe and Africa; client work skews to tech and business-services centers.
Cadre is a boutique San Francisco Bay Area software engineering recruiting firm serving high-growth startups since 2007, deliberately capped at fifteen recruiters, sourcing candidates directly rather than through job postings.
Carex Consulting Group is a recruiting firm with a decade-long healthtech practice placing implementation & onboarding, customer success, product & project management, sales & marketing, and engineering/data/DevOps talent for healthtech, digital health, and health-and-wellness startups scaling from around 30 to 500+ employees.
Chasen Talent is a solo founder-led boutique search firm running engineering, revenue, and go-to-market searches for early-stage to growth startups in California, New York, and remote, with every search handled personally by founder Chasen Nick from intake through close.
Clutch Talent is a technical recruiting firm with offices in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, offering software engineering hiring, embedded recruitment, talent representation, and strategic consulting for startups and tech companies.
Making your first technical hires with no recruiter on staff? Coastal Recruiting is a boutique Los Angeles engineering and product recruiter for early-stage, VC-backed startups at exactly that point.
UK technology recruiter for start-ups and scale-ups across Europe, specialising in software engineers. Offers fully embedded recruitment, a flexible part-time embedded option, and one-off candidate search.
Fabric Staffing is a recruitment-as-a-service (RaaS) provider, operating since 2016, that helps founders, VCs and high-growth companies scale engineering and product teams with dedicated candidate pipelines.
FindIT Recruitment is a Belgrade-based agency that combines HR expertise with IT knowledge to recruit developers and other tech professionals for companies hiring in Serbia, with a process built around a tech-background brief, culture brief and job description before candidate selection.
Forwardly Partners provides embedded RPO for scaling SaaS companies: a senior recruiter joins the client team and owns the hiring process across engineering, product, GTM, operations and people roles. It recruits for distributed teams across the US, Latin America and Europe in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and also offers full-cycle search.
Golden Gate Recruiting is a boutique San Francisco staffing agency running full-cycle recruiting for early-stage startups across engineering, product, sales, marketing, operations and legal roles, with the person running the search owning the hire.
HC Solutions is an IT recruitment and HR outsourcing company based in Serbia, placing developers, DevOps, QA and IT project managers for international clients, and also offering outsourced recruitment and HR operations, relocation support, and help setting up development hubs in Serbia.
High Slope Recruiting is a founder-led firm placing engineering and executive talent, including staff and principal engineers, ML researchers, and founding technical leads, at Series A-C startups.
KORE1 is an Irvine, California staffing and recruiting firm founded in 2005. It offers direct hire, contract and project-based staffing across the U.S., with technology specialties including software, AI/ML, cloud, DevOps and data engineering, plus a startup staffing service.
LatamCent is a nearshore staffing and recruiting agency that places Latin American AI/ML and software engineers, customer success, GTM, finance and marketing talent with US AI and SaaS teams, offering direct hire and a talent-as-a-service model with contractor-of-record payroll.
Lupa Hire is a tech recruiting agency placing pre-vetted engineers and digital professionals from Latin America with US companies, offering recruiting, staffing and RPO and sending curated shortlists of 3-4 candidates per role.
LuRecruiter is a solo-led IT headhunting practice in Lima, Peru, run by recruiter Lucero Lamas, placing engineers, data/AI specialists, product managers and technical leaders from across 14 Latin American countries at US and LATAM startups, from pre-seed to Series B.
Recruiting firm focused on Brazil, run by founder Mariana Mavila (former VP of Talent Marketplace at Andela). Offers three tracks: tech roles, business roles, and executive search for directors, VPs and C-level, which Mariana runs personally. Serves Brazilian and US companies and founders hiring in Brazil.
Merot is a Balkans-based outsourcing company whose recruitment service sources, screens, and delivers shortlists for engineering, sales, and operations roles across North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, and Serbia, running searches up to head-of-engineering/VP-engineering level.
Near Horizons sources, evaluates and embeds pre-vetted Latin American software engineers into U.S. startup teams, covering full-stack, backend, frontend, QA, DevOps, mobile and data/AI roles in US-aligned time zones. It also offers forward-deployed AI engineering.
nSky Solutions (nSky Recruitment Agency) offers startup talent advisory for early-stage founders: choosing a recruiting model (in-house, contract, or outsourced), building candidate pipelines, and designing scalable talent acquisition strategy, alongside global recruitment services focused on engineering teams.
Nxt Level runs retained executive search for VC-backed startups, covering VP Engineering, CTO, VP Product, CFO, COO, CMO and CRO roles from Series A through Series D+, alongside engineering and product recruiting.
PeopleFirst Talent Partners (formerly PeopleFirst Agency) is a founder-led tech recruiting boutique in Buenos Aires, founded by Carla Costantini. It recruits senior engineering, data, AI and AdTech talent for startups and scale-ups across Latin America, the US and Europe.
Recruits Lab embeds recruiting teams (senior technical recruiter, sourcer, coordinator, and recruiting ops) inside venture-backed startups and growth companies, alongside hybrid, retained, and contingency search. Its practice concentrates on AI/ML, software engineering, SaaS go-to-market, cybersecurity, and life sciences hiring across the US.
Refery is a startup recruiting network for VC-backed Seed to Series B companies hiring engineering, AI, and go-to-market talent, combining specialist independent recruiters with referrals from founders, operators, and investors.
RemoteEngine offers recruitment process outsourcing through dedicated recruiting pods embedded in a client's ATS and hiring workflow, with enterprise, project and on-demand models. It focuses on engineering, AI/ML, data, security, product and sales-engineering roles and also provides employer-of-record services for global hires.
UK recruiter working with early-stage technology startups since 1987, placing founding engineers, AI engineers, senior developers and CTOs in London, Oxford, Birmingham and the M3/M4 corridor, plus remote roles. Also covers scaleup and SME recruitment.
Rocket (Neatly Technologies, Inc.) is an AI-native recruiting firm started in San Francisco with additional teams in Toronto and New York, placing engineering, product, go-to-market, and executive roles for high-growth, VC-backed startups from Series A through IPO via contingency, executive search, and embedded models.
Schultz Staffing is a founder-led fractional recruiting practice that embeds with VC-backed startups, pre-seed to Series A, as their in-house recruiter. It runs personalized outreach from the client's own inbox, and the founder, Erich Schultz, previously recruited in-house at Earnest, Rutter, and Forethought.
Shields Group Search is a New York City-based executive recruiting firm specializing in startup and scale-up hiring, providing executive and technical talent acquisition for venture-backed companies from Seed through Series C across SaaS, fintech, healthtech, and Web3.
Solara Talent is a New York-focused technical recruiting firm that helps venture-backed startups hire software engineers, product managers, designers, and growth talent using a proprietary sourcing platform called Recruiter OS.
Solo-operator technical recruiting practice based in the San Francisco Bay Area (also working New York City), specializing in AI/LLM and software founding-engineer hires for seed through Series A/B startups, with 20 years of Bay Area recruiting experience and the last decade focused on startups.
StartupTAP is a Los Angeles recruiting consultancy that works with startups on executive and individual-contributor hiring, engineering and non-technical roles, and management infrastructure. Its site states 11 years in business and 295 clients across 8 countries.
TalentMinted is a boutique IT recruitment partner for startups and growing tech teams hiring software engineers, AI specialists and technical leaders across EU countries, wider Europe, Ukraine, Canada and selected US searches, including embedded and defense-tech roles.
Talento Consulting AI is a Los Angeles-based talent consultancy specializing in go-to-market, product, and engineering hiring for early-stage and high-growth tech startups, offering embedded RPO, hiring sprints, and retained search from seed through pre-IPO, serving LA, San Francisco, New York, and London.
Teamcubate (Teamcubate ApS) describes itself as a team incubator that hires tech talent for global startups and growth companies, mainly in IT, marketing and finance. It has a Belgrade, Serbia hub and recruits remote developers for long-term projects with North European growth companies, with offices also listed in Aarhus, Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Tech StaQ is a tech recruitment firm with offices in Barcelona and Amsterdam. It offers embedded recruitment (RPO) with a dedicated recruiter inside the client team on a monthly model, plus specialist headhunting for software, platform, AI/ML and data engineers and technical leadership, and employer-of-record hiring in Spain.
Building a distributed engineering team? Terminal is a San Francisco engineering recruiting platform for growth-stage companies. It places engineers, AI/ML developers and engineering managers in Canada, Latin America and Europe, and offers employer-of-record services.
Independent commercial and technical IT recruiter focused on the Netherlands and Germany (Amsterdam and Berlin), working with start-ups, scale-ups and multinationals across cloud, data, engineering, product and go-to-market roles.
The Search Experience (TSE) is a San Francisco-based startup recruitment agency that partners with venture-backed founders from Seed through Series C to build go-to-market, technical, and design teams, working with companies backed by firms such as Sequoia, Greylock, and SoftBank.
The Startup Talent Agency is a recruiting firm founded by a CHRO that works only with startups. It recruits across engineering and product, go-to-market, executive and leadership, and G&A roles.
Turmero Talent is a contingency recruiting firm focused only on technical roles, placing backend, platform, infrastructure, DevOps/SRE engineers and engineering managers at seed to Series A startups of roughly 11-50 employees.
Nearshore executive search for funded US startups, recruiting senior engineering, product and go-to-market leaders across Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Works through three verticals (Venture Engineering, Product, GTM) using its own 10-criteria assessment framework.
Zytheq is a San Francisco Bay Area recruiting firm running engineering, data/AI, product, go-to-market, and executive searches for Series A-D startups and larger tech companies, offering contingency search, retained executive search, and embedded/RPO recruiting out of its San Francisco office.
No companies match that search.
Questions buyers ask
How many recruiting firms for startups do Engineering Recruiting?
47 of the 210 companies in this directory. The list is compiled from public information and refreshed as companies change.
How is this list ordered?
The featured partner, Recruitmint, which publishes this directory, is pinned first and labelled. Everyone else is alphabetical. Position is not for sale.
Do companies pay to appear on this page?
No. Inclusion is free and unpaid. Recruitmint is the only company with a commercial relationship to this site, and it is disclosed on every page.