The startup roles that take 92 days to fill

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The startup roles that take 92 days to fill

One role was rated Hard every single time

Every forward deployed and solutions role we scored came back Hard. No other role on Contrario comes close to that.

It makes sense once you look at the job. A forward deployed engineer writes production code, then sits with a customer to get the product working inside their business. They need to be a strong engineer and comfortable in front of a client, often on the same day. Plenty of people are good at one of those. The pool that's good at both is small.

Those roles also take the longest to fill. The median forward deployed search runs 92 days from opening to hire, which is about three months. A full-stack search takes 59.

And demand is climbing. In the last six months, forward deployed and solutions roles went from 3.5% of engineering roles on Contrario to 11.5%, roughly triple. More startups now want a profile that was already hard to find.

One caveat: only nine forward deployed roles were scored, so the 100% is a strong signal more than a settled number.

The rest of engineering is hard too

Forward deployed sits at the top, but the roles behind it aren't far off. 82% of scored DevOps and infrastructure roles are rated Hard, along with 80% of AI and ML roles and 79% of full-stack roles. Backend comes in at 73%.

Frontend is the engineering role least likely to be rated Hard, and even there, two out of three scored roles are rated Hard. Non-engineering roles, for comparison, sit at 63%.

So for an early-stage startup hiring engineers, a hard search is the normal case. The question is what kind of hard.

AI/ML fills fast, with a lot of work behind it

AI and ML roles are rated Hard 80% of the time, yet they fill fastest of the three roles we have hiring times for. The median AI or ML search closes in 37 days, well ahead of full-stack's 59.

The effort behind that speed is big, though. Recruiters submit 202 candidates for every AI or ML hire, the most of any large category on Contrario. Full-stack takes 178.

Put those two numbers next to each other and AI/ML searches look wide and fast. Companies see a lot of candidates in a short time before they find the one they hire. The search is quick on the calendar and heavy on the work.

What it means if you're hiring

If you're hiring a forward deployed or solutions engineer, plan for about three months and start early. Be clear about the balance you want between engineering and customer work, since that split is what narrows the pool.

If you're hiring for AI/ML, expect to see a lot of candidates in a short time. Decide what you're screening for before the search starts, so you can move quickly on the right one when they show up.

For DevOps and full-stack roles, most searches are still rated Hard. A sharp brief that says what the person will own in their first few months saves time on both sides.

Contrario matches each role with recruiters who specialize in that kind of search, and Reagent checks every new role against the candidates already on the platform. For the hardest roles, that head start matters.

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