The Benefits of Hiring Embedded Engineers

Hiring embedded engineers can speed up your hiring cycle while increasing your talent bar. Want to make your hiring budget go further while increasing your talent bar? Here’s how.

Hiring costs stack up quickly.

Recruitment efforts, onboarding new hires, progress lost while looking for the right fit: these investments come with their own cost, and the investments in taking them on don’t always pay off — especially when your project needs to kick off quickly or is short- or medium-term in duration.

Backend engineers are often hard to hire, especially for more specialized skills. Once they’ve been hired, their tenure is known to be short — salaries are high, and there are often greener pastures. If your organization wants to make sure you’re investing in the right hires for your strategic priorities, spending your recruiting budget wisely, and setting your hires up for a quick and easy onboarding process, embedded teams may be the right model for you. Working with a firm that has experience placing experienced hires who will help you make sure that you have the right people on the right projects, maximizing your ROI by all metrics.

But before we convince you of the benefits of hiring embedded engineers, let’s explain what embedded hiring is and three benefits of hiring embedded teams.

What’s the embedded hiring model?

There are a few ways to engage engineers, with the most popular being full-time permanent employees, independent contractors, and embedded teams.

Embedded hires come with the benefits of full-time hires — they’re embedded within your organization and participate in your team’s rituals — while not being directly employed by your company. As contractors, they arrive at your company after a full vetting process through an independent firm, such as HFC. HFC’s bench of skilled, senior-level engineers allows us to place experts in their field who have worked on similar projects with other clients, making onboarding easier and quicker.

Firms that hire embedded talent well will vet not just according to their own values, but your organization’s too. They’ll work with your technical stakeholders to make sure your team is involved and bought in, building trust while cutting time and costs. If your company doesn’t have a recruiting team or set processes, working with a firm that’s skilled in this line of work will set a standard for hiring skilled team members thoughtfully and quickly.

If this makes more sense for your organization, embedded teams can work independently of your company’s existing teams. For companies based in North America, being able to hire talent in other time zones can allow them to expand their budget without sacrificing on skills or seniority. LATAM, for example, has a rich talent market with a significantly reduced hiring cost.

How HFC vets engineers

To make sure we’re bringing our clients the most capable, experienced engineers suited for their unique environment, we have a thoughtful and thorough multi-step vetting process.

• Product/technical discovery: Before starting the recruitment process, HFC runs a discovery process to make sure we fully understand your team’s makeup, responsibilities, rituals, environment, and tech stack.


• Sourcing candidates: We work with internal and external recruiting partners to identify candidates who align with our clients’ needs, along with company culture and values.


• Evaluating candidates: Once candidates have passed the initial resume review, we interview them to evaluate communication styles, technical understanding, and experience. Our team is made up of senior practitioners, many of whom have over 15 years of experience across product, design, and many different technology stacks. For companies that don’t have the in-house recruiting structure to vet to this degree, HFC can provide the resources and knowledge to hire the best of the best.


• Client fit: If they pass this interview, then we’ll consider them ready to meet with clients and begin their interview processes. At this point, the client is able to decide if the candidate will work well in their existing structure and make the final call. This stage includes a coding exercise.

Three benefits of embedded teams

1. Hire qualified talent quickly

With an existing pool of vetted talent, firms have engineers they can readily tap who have the skills your team needs.

Time-to-hire comes at a significant cost — especially for engineers, whose attrition rate is the highest in tech. Without a “bench” of qualified engineers to choose from, your organization will face the same hiring costs time and time again every time your team needs to expand. In the event that we don’t have an engineer who’s the perfect fit for your team, we know where to source from and how to get them onboarded fast.

Embedded teams are known for their reliability because they’re recruited and vetted by firms like HFC, which have years of experience finding and placing the best talent on the market for a variety of projects. Especially for a first or founding hire, you don’t have time to waste trying to figure out how to hire and what great looks like. To get the right person in the role, you need a partner who’s done this successfully before.

2. Build flexibility into your organizational structure

Does your organization have predictable busy and quiet seasons? Do you have a big launch coming up that needs short-term extra support? Do you want to expand your team temporarily while figuring out if a project is worth a more significant investment?

If you aren’t sure whether you need to hire more engineers for the long-term, working with embedded engineers and teams can help you figure that out. Gauging the impact of expanding your engineering team without obligating your company to the cost of hiring permanent employees can increase the impact of your existing team while reducing hiring risk.

3. Extend your budget

Full-time permanent hires come with costs beyond their salary. Insurance, PTO, retirement benefits, and any other perks your organization offers add to salaries that are known to be among the highest in tech talent.

If you know you need long-term engineering talent but worry about the cost commitment, hiring embedded teams allows you to explore nearshoring and offshoring. Hiring someone at the skill level you need at a significantly reduced salary will increase your team’s impact without any compromise. If your organization is looking to enter new markets, hiring talent abroad will bring you closer to those markets.

Make your engineering investment go further with an embedded team

Hiring embedded teams reduces costs from hiring to attrition, decreases time to onboard, and increases the likelihood of bringing on the talent you need at the time you need it for as long as you need.

HFC has been recruiting and placing embedded teams for over 15 years. In that time, we’ve seen how much embedded teams can contribute to their projects, doing impactful work while reducing costs and stress on the company.

Whether you want to experiment with a new product or feature, test out a new market, or just reduce your costs, the benefits of hiring embedded engineers and teams are numerous. If you’re thinking embedded hiring sounds right for you, HFC has seen the benefits of hiring embedded teams across industries and team sizes — reach out today for a consult!

Curious about the work we’ve done for other clients? Nabil Ahmad, CTO of Dotdash Meredith, says, “HappyFunCorp has been a great partner to us throughout the years. We first engaged them to help us rebuild about.com. Many years and two name changes later, they’re still the first people we call when we need help staffing.