01Engineer
Adaeze Ikenna
Senior backend engineer · Lagos, Nigeria
Seven years on payment infrastructure, four of them at a major African fintech. Led a retry-queue rewrite that moved webhook reliability from 94% to 99.7%.
Pre-vetted engineers · From Africa · For global companies
Senior engineers, vetted and ready. A shortlist in seventy-two hours.
We’ve done the sourcing work already. You interview three or four people we’d hire ourselves. Based in Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, Accra, and across the continent.
72hShortlist
From your request to three vetted candidates.
10%Placement fee
Paid once, only if you hire. No retainers.
30dGuarantee
Replace or refund half if the fit breaks.
The problem
You’ve done this before. You post the role, you get four hundred applicants, you screen for a week, you run first-round calls, half don’t show up, the ones who do aren’t right, and three weeks later you’re back where you started.
TalentLayer is for the next time you’d rather skip all of that. We send you three or four people we’ve already interviewed, already know the work of, and already trust. If none of them fit, we didn’t cost you anything.
Thesis
African engineers are not cheap. They are under-discovered. The teams that figure this out early will spend less on hiring and get better work back. Not because labor costs less, but because the supply is deeper, the motivation is sharper, and the gatekeeping between talent and opportunity is thinner than it looks.
Our job is to close that gap for you. A small team that does the screening work before the role is even open, so the shortlist that lands in your inbox is people we’d hire ourselves.
How it works
Four steps. One commitment, only if you hire.
- t = 0
You tell us who you’re hiring.
A short form: the role, the level, the timeline, the budget. Five minutes.
- t ≈ 72h
A shortlist arrives in your inbox.
Three to five engineers we’ve vetted, interviewed, and matched to what you described. Full profiles, no résumé theater.
- t + 1–2 weeks
You run a paid trial.
Real work at the candidate’s real rate. You see them work before you commit. They’re paid for their time.
- on hire
You hire. We charge 10% of first-year salary.
Paid once, within thirty days of the start date. If the hire doesn’t last 30 days for fit reasons, we replace them free or refund half. After that, you and the engineer sign a formal employment contract.
The talent
Engineers from eight cities +, and the continent behind them.
Africa has some of the fastest-growing engineering communities in the world. Native English, time zones that overlap usefully with Europe and the US East Coast, and senior engineers with production experience at companies like Paystack, Flutterwave, and Jumia. The constraint has never been the talent. It has been access.
- Lagos
- Nairobi
- Accra
- Cape Town
- Kampala
- Kigali
- Johannesburg
- Cairo
02Engineer
Wanjiru Kamau
Senior mobile engineer · Nairobi, Kenya
Eight years across iOS and Android. Previously led mobile at a mobile-money operator with 40M monthly active users. Writes Swift and Kotlin natively.
03Engineer
Kwame Mensah
Full-stack / smart contracts · Accra, Ghana
Five years of production Solidity and TypeScript. Audited two mid-size DeFi protocols, shipped a stablecoin ramp used across West Africa.
04Engineer
Thandi Mokoena
Platform engineer · Cape Town, South Africa
Nine years on infrastructure. Built and ran the observability stack for a B2B SaaS that scaled from ten to two hundred engineers. Kubernetes, Terraform, Go.
05Engineer
Yusuf El-Sayed
Senior frontend engineer · Cairo, Egypt
Six years of React and TypeScript on consumer products. Led the frontend rewrite of a regional e-commerce platform serving twelve million users.
06Engineer
Joseph Abebe
Senior backend engineer · Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Six years on distributed systems in Go and Rust. Previously wrote the matching engine for a pan-African freight logistics startup.
Placements
All placements →The work, in the open.
We write up every placement with consent from both sides. Here is the most recent.
Pricing
10%
of first-year salary
Paid once, only if you hire.
Thirty days after the new hire starts. The paid trial before placement is billed at the candidate’s rate plus a reduced platform fee. No monthly fees, no per-candidate fees, no retainer. If the placement fails inside 30 days for fit reasons, we replace them or refund half. After that, you and the engineer move to a formal employment contract (3, 6, or 12 months).
For engineers
Serious roles. Serious clients. Paid trial work.
We vet carefully and we match carefully. We only contact you about roles that actually fit, and we pay you for your time during evaluation. No spam, no cattle calls.