FDEs are the most competed-for engineering hire in tech right now. We place pre-vetted candidates in 14 days, at 70% less than a US hire.
Four steps. Fourteen days. Your shortlist is ready before most companies finish writing the job description.
You tell us the stack, the use cases, and what a strong FDE looks like in your specific context. We finalize the brief and start sourcing within 24 hours.
Only the top 1% advances. From 600+ sourced candidates, we run technical assessments, live coding evaluations, and communication screens to find the three worth your time.
Three pre-vetted candidates on your calendar. No screening calls, no wasted afternoons. You ask the hard questions and pick the one who fits.
Contracts, payroll, international compliance, and ongoing retention check-ins, all handled by us. You manage the work, not the paperwork.
Technical assessments are built around your stack, not a generic coding test. Every candidate on your shortlist has production experience in the tools your customers actually use.
Most agencies will treat this like a standard engineering search. It is not. FDEs do not apply to job boards. They do not respond to cold LinkedIn messages. Finding them requires a network built specifically around this role, which is exactly what we have.
We source across LATAM, Africa, and Eastern Europe, screen 600+ candidates per role, and put the top three in front of you. By the time you interview, the work is already done.
That's faster than most companies finish their first round of interviews. We've run this search enough times to know exactly where FDE talent is, what it looks like, and how to move on it.
Better than most domestic engineering teams. The model works because our FDEs work real hours in real time zones. No burnout cycle. No attrition spike six months in.
No upfront cost. Month-to-month contracts. If the person we place isn't right for any reason, we find you someone else. We don't need a contract to keep your business.
We don't start searching when you submit a brief. We've spent years sourcing, vetting, and staying in touch with the best FDE talent across four regions, so when you need someone, they're already there.
The question is not whether to hire an FDE. It is how fast you can get the right one in the seat before your competitors do.
B2B buyers now expect API access, custom integrations, and product-level responsiveness. An FDE closes that gap in real time, directly in the sales cycle, the onboarding process, and the CS motion. Without one, you are losing deals to competitors who already have one.
Palantir, Anduril, OpenAI, and Databricks built their GTM motion on FDEs. Not as an experiment. As a core part of how they win and retain enterprise customers. The playbook is proven. Most companies at your stage are still catching up.
A US-based FDE runs $160K to $220K fully loaded. The same caliber hire through Scale Army starts at $6,999/month, native English, US time-zone aligned, onboarded in 14 days. Not a compromise on quality. A structural advantage the companies using it do not advertise.
You have four options. Three of them will slow you down.
| Capability | Scale Army | Hire Directly | Other Agency | Upwork | Offshore Agency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Talks directly to customers | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ||
| Builds and ships independently | PARTIAL | PARTIAL | ✗ | ||
| AI & LLM integration | ✗ | PARTIAL | ✗ | PARTIAL | |
| Automation & workflow builds | ✗ | PARTIAL | ✗ | PARTIAL | |
| Owns product decisions | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | |
| API & systems integration | ✗ | PARTIAL | |||
| Works in customer environment | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ||
| No PM dependency to ship | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | PARTIAL | |
| Accelerates sales & CS | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ||
| Typical cost via Scale Army | From $6,999/mo | $13,500/mo | $11,500/mo | $9,500/mo | $10,500/mo |
Leandro has been a fantastic addition to our team. He quickly adapted to his role and has been delivering excellent work. I would absolutely recommend him for any new opportunity.
We had a super-specific marketing role to fill — someone who could own CRM and lifecycle, write great content, and handle both strategy and execution — and Scale Army nailed it. We knocked out 12 interviews in just three and a half weeks, and all we had to do was show up. Compared to other platforms we've used, the talent quality was way higher and the Scale Army team honestly felt like an extension of our own.
They were both able to settle in pretty quickly and immediately wanted to begin getting involved in active projects. Their skills and personalities have been well received by the team and by all accounts it appears they're flourishing.
The Scale Army team has been awesome to work with. We've kicked off around 20 searches, and throughout each one, it genuinely felt like they listened — whether we needed someone with stronger SQL experience or loved a candidate's CRO background. They were also incredibly flexible during the buyout process, which made it easy to bring several hires in-house; I've already recommended Scale Army to a bunch of friends who were just starting to figure out their offshore strategy.
TTell us the role, the stack, and what great looks like. We handle the rest, sourcing, screening, vetting, and placing, in 14 days.