What is Zelcast?

For companies

You brief us once, and we come back with a small number of people and a real argument for each: what they’ve built, how they work, and why this room in particular. Zelcast fills engineering roles only, from founding engineers through staff and principal, plus the first engineering leaders. Introduction to offer runs seven days on average, and one at its fastest. If nobody fits, we tell you early, in the first conversation.

The fee is 15% of first-year base, paid when someone is hired. There’s no charge to talk to us, none for a brief, and none if we don’t find the person.

For engineers

Applying takes two minutes, needs no account, and is read by a person. We get to know your work, your convictions, and what you want from the next ten years before any role exists. When something fits, it’s one company and why we think it fits. If nothing fits, you won’t hear from us. You don’t need to be looking, and it’s always free: companies pay us, and you aren’t the product being sold.

Who is behind Zelcast

Zelcast is backed by people who have founded companies, hired hundreds of engineers, and invested in a few hundred startups.

Two tools anyone can use

The Eng Scorer reads a public LinkedIn profile the way an early-stage startup screens one and returns a score out of 99 with the evidence behind it. Most reads also carry a pay band for the kind of role the profile describes, built from about 519,000 certified US wage filings. It measures the profile, not the person, and says so.

The alumni map shows where engineers go when they leave a company, which companies produce founders, and who stays longest, across the careers of 67,181 engineers. The headlines are in where engineers go next.

What Zelcast is not

Zelcast isn’t a high-volume recruiting agency. It doesn’t work with large established companies, and it doesn’t charge engineers. It’s unrelated to the Roblox podcast of a similar name. The longer argument for why it exists is Talent Superintelligence.