Case Study

How Maximor built its core engineering team with Contrario

Maximor set an uncompromising bar: IIT-level international talent. Here's how Contrario built its entire remote engineering team to match, without trading speed for quality.

Arya Marwaha

Co-Founder & CEO

May 16, 2026

1.4 days

to their fastest engineering hire

100%

of their remote eng team hired through Contrario

4

engineers hired

Maximor is an AI-native finance platform whose Audit-Ready Agents automate the finance and accounting work CFO teams usually do by hand. The company raised $10M in seed funding led by Foundation Capital.

Ajay, Maximor's founder/CTO and an IIT Bombay engineer, set the hiring bar himself. Every engineer had to match the caliber of school and company he trusted, a bar narrow enough that filling it usually means a long, grinding search.

Prayag Jain

Founding Engineer

Shubham Dhiman

Founding Engineer

Dhruv Bhatnagar

Founding Engineer

Vyankatesh Sawalapurkar

Founding Engineer

The Problem

Every agency sent volume. None cleared the bar.

Maximor needed to build most of its core engineering team, with a focus on remote international engineers who were exceptionally skilled. That talent is scarce, concentrated in a handful of top schools and companies, and difficult to reach.

Before Contrario, Maximor had worked through the field of recruiting agencies and come away frustrated. Every agency optimized for quantity over fit, and the recruiters did not listen closely enough to source against a bar this specific.

Maximor had features to ship and customers closing in its pipeline, and engineering capacity was the constraint on all of it. The longer a role stayed open, the more it slowed what the company could build.

The Solution

A recruiter calibrated to the bar, not to volume

Contrario deployed Parmesh, a recruiter with deep networks into elite Indian engineering talent, and calibrated directly to Maximor's bar from the outset rather than pushing profiles at it.

The difference showed up on the very first submissions. Maximor had asked Contrario to answer a set of vetting questions with every candidate, covering working hours, English fluency, and more, before the founder spent a minute on a call. Contrario returned all of them with each profile.

"Maximor's bar was extremely high, so I stayed close to the account, calibrated with Ajay on every profile, and only put forward engineers I was confident could clear it."

— Parmesh, Recruiter, Contrario

Parmesh ran the account hands-on: joining check-in calls, calibrating closely with Ajay, testing different candidate archetypes, and doubling down on the ones that converted to hires and on-site interviews.

The impact

Built from the ground up, and still building

The results came fast. Contrario placed Maximor's fastest engineering hire in 1.4 days and a remote backend engineer in 20 days, then continued filling roles at a steady cadence as the team scaled. That speed let Maximor keep shipping against its pipeline instead of waiting on open seats.

The partnership also changed how Maximor hires. The company has since brought on a Head of Talent, who is being mentored directly by Contrario's CEO Arya Marwaha, and adopted a more rigorous technical interview process shaped in part by Contrario's guidance.

With its remote engineering team established, Maximor is now expanding into in-person engineering in New York and is partnering with Contrario on that search.

"They built our remote engineering team from the ground up. Now I'm betting on them for our New York team, just like I bet on them for our remote engineers."

— Ajay, Founder, Maximor

Maximor

AI-Powered Financial Close

Industry

AI Software & Infrastructure

Headquarters

New York City

Employees

50+

Stage

Seed

FOUNDERS

Ajay Krishna Amuda

Co-Founder

Ramnandan Krishnamurthy

CEO of Maximor

Roles Hired via Contrario

Founding Engineer

x4

3+ roles ongoing…

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