Five days from request to signed offer.
A New York fintech had spent six weeks looking for a senior backend engineer. We sent them three. They hired the first.
Trove Labs
Payments infrastructure · Series B
New York, USA
Adaeze Ikenna
Senior backend engineer
Lagos, Nigeria
Trove Labs is a thirty-person Series B fintech in New York building payment rails for marketplaces. Their CTO, Kate Lin, had been running a hiring process since early January. A recruiter on retainer, forty résumés screened, eight first-round calls, one offer extended and declined. By the time she filled out the TalentLayer request form on a Tuesday morning, the role had been open for forty-one days.
We sent three candidates on Thursday evening. Adaeze Ikenna’s profile matched almost exactly what Kate had described: seven years in production backend work, four of them on payment infrastructure at a major African fintech, lead on a retry-queue rewrite that moved webhook reliability from 94% to 99.7%. Adaeze was in Lagos. Trove was open to remote.
We’d spent six weeks with a recruiter. We spent Five days with TalentLayer and hired the best engineer we’ve interviewed this year.
The technical interview ran two hours. Adaeze walked through the retry-queue architecture from scratch: priorities, dead-letter handling, idempotency keys, the specific failure mode that had cost them a customer in 2023. Kate’s engineering lead asked three sharp questions. They moved straight to trial planning instead of scheduling a second round.
The trial was scoped to rebuild Trove’s webhook delivery layer over two weeks. Adaeze delivered it in nine days. By day Five the offer letter was signed.
I’d applied to fifteen places on LinkedIn and heard back from none. TalentLayer called me back in two days. Four serious conversations, no wasted time.
Adaeze started three weeks after the offer was signed. Six months in, she’s leading the payment integrations team at Trove.
Want a shortlist like this one?
Five-minute form. Three vetted engineers in your inbox within seventy-two hours. No commitment and no cost until you hire.