Add senior engineers without adding a four-month hiring cycle
Clownmind people join your team, your repository and your standups. You direct the work; we handle contracts, cover, appraisals and continuity.
- Start in ~2 weeks
- Rolling monthly
- Replacement guarantee
Four situations where this beats hiring
And one where it does not: if the work is permanent, core to your product and ongoing, hire someone. We will tell you that on the call.
Hiring takes four months you do not have
A senior engineer takes twelve to sixteen weeks to source, interview and onboard. An embedded engineer starts in two, and you can convert them to a permanent hire later if it works.
The roadmap is spiky, headcount is not
A replatform needs four engineers for five months and one afterwards. Hiring for the peak leaves you overstaffed; hiring for the baseline leaves the peak unshipped.
One specialism is missing
The team is strong but nobody has shipped a Hydrogen storefront, or written a native module, or tuned a Postgres query plan under load. That gap does not justify a permanent hire.
Somebody senior left
Cover the gap credibly while you run a proper search, rather than making a rushed hire because the roadmap is stalling.
Three ways to bring people in
Same engineers throughout. The difference is how much delivery ownership you keep.
Embedded engineer
One or more of our people join your standups, your repo and your on-call rotation. You manage the work; we handle contracts, cover and continuity.
Pod
A self-contained team — lead engineer, two developers, part-time designer — that owns a stream of work end to end and reports on outcomes.
Fractional lead
A senior architect for one or two days a week: reviews, technical decisions, hiring support and the arguments nobody internally can win alone.
What we commit to in writing
- One-month rolling contracts, two weeks' notice either way
- At least four hours of live overlap with your working day
- Replacement at our cost if the fit is wrong in the first fortnight
- No recruitment fee, no margin on expenses, no charge for oversight
- Our people work in your repository, under your definition of done
- Conversion to a permanent hire allowed after six months, fee-free
Available roles
Tell us about the gap
Stack, team size, start date and what the person would own. We reply with names and real availability.
Augmentation questions
Agencies place people they have never worked with. Every engineer we place is a Clownmind employee who has shipped with our other teams, is reviewed by our leads, and has the rest of the studio to escalate to when they hit something unfamiliar.
No. Embedded engineers are allocated full-time to one client. Fractional architects are explicitly part-time and you know exactly which days you have them.
After six months you can convert an embedded engineer to a permanent hire with no conversion fee. Before six months there is a pro-rated fee. We would rather you kept a good engineer than lost one to our contract terms.
You direct the work day to day. We handle appraisals, pay, cover and career development, and our delivery lead checks in monthly to catch problems you might be too polite to raise.
That is the usual pattern. Most pods started as a single embedded engineer whose scope grew. Scaling up takes two to four weeks depending on the specialism.
Want an opinion on your architecture before you commit budget?
Thirty minutes with a principal engineer. No deck, no discovery call disguised as a sales call.