A founding engineering team, hired away from safer offers

The brief was the client's founding engineering team: up to five senior full-stack engineers, hired from nothing. There was no existing team for them to join and no employer brand to lean on. The first engineers would be the company.

What made it hard was what those engineers were being asked to give up. The client was a brand new player in a sector that was crowded at the time, and the mature, autonomous, English-speaking engineers who could do this job could get roles at far more established and far more comfortable companies. The search had to go well past what a job description asked for: the client did not need people who met the requirements, it needed pioneers.

Software engineering is the core of the desk, so reaching candidates was never the constraint. The work was in the targeting: building a list of startups and mid-scale companies with international leadership, international teams or products with global reach. People already used to building for a market larger than Thailand were the ones most likely to hear a founding pitch as an opportunity rather than a risk.

One candidate showed what that targeting was for. A very senior engineer, working remotely from northern Thailand for a well-established regional fintech, he wanted to be part of something new and build from scratch, to the point of being willing to fly to Bangkok for a week every couple of months at his own expense. Appetite like that cannot be demanded in a job description. It has to be found.