Bonfire · for organisations

Hire on evidence, not interviews.

Engineers whose work you can already see.

Bonfire places people with months of real, paid, senior-reviewed output from inside our studio. Not a polished CV, a coding test, and a well-rehearsed hour on a video call.

Start a conversation How Bonfire works
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What changed

The bottleneck has moved.

Agents absorb most of the typing. What is left is the judgement around the code, and none of it shows up on a CV.

Product understanding Deep communication Systems thinking Architectural design Agent orchestration

Why AI spending disappoints

New tools, old org chart.

When factories first got electric motors, most saw no gain at all. They bolted the motor where the steam engine had been and kept the floor plan. The gains only came once the factory was rebuilt around the new power. Most companies are doing the same thing with AI right now. Bonfire builders come from a floor that was rebuilt on day one.

What you get

A pod, not a pile of CVs.

Work is done by a mission pod: a small team that owns one outcome from start to finish. No handoffs, no ticket queue, no waiting on another department.

Pods are sized to the work, not to a staffing target. Every one has at least one senior engineer and a Cheerful Monster principal who is hands on with the work, not reporting on it.

Agents are on the pod's org chart too. We are explicit about what they do, what the humans do, and what always gets human review.

2 to 5 people, sized to the project

Always

Senior engineer Sets the technical bar and reviews everything that ships.
Studio oversight A Cheerful Monster principal, hands on with the work itself.

As the work needs

Second senior engineer For breadth, or a second opinion where the stakes are high.
Junior builder Apprenticed into real work, reviewed on everything they ship.
Designer When the thing has a surface that people have to use.
Product manager When the problem needs framing as much as it needs building.
Data scientist When the answer lives in the data before it lives in the code.
AI/ML engineer When models have to be trained, evaluated and kept honest.
DevOps / MLOps When it has to run, scale and stay up inside your environment.

What this de-risks

Months of evidence, not an hour of guessing.

Verified work, not claimed work

Everything in a Bonfire portfolio shipped inside a real client project, under review.

Judgement observed over months

We have watched them frame problems, direct agents, review output, and recover from being wrong.

AI-native from day one

They arrive fluent in the way the strongest teams now work.

A hire that's already worked

The riskiest thing about a technical hire is that you learn the truth after the offer. Bonfire moves that learning before it.

How it works commercially

Two ways to work with us.

Both end in the same place: an offer to someone you have already worked with.

Option A

Build engagement

You have work that needs doing.

  1. Scope the work

    A project, a discrete piece of work, or ongoing BAU. We size the pod to what the work actually needs.

  2. The pod builds

    2 to 5 people, senior-led, with a studio principal hands on. You get delivered work, not a staffing plan.

  3. You pay pass-through

    What the pod costs is what you pay. No hidden margin, no bench buried in the day rate.

  4. First refusal

    At the end, you have first refusal on any or all of the pod.

  5. They choose

    A builder can take your offer, stay with the studio, or move on. If they join you, the hire comes at a discount.

The trick: you are not paying for a hiring process. You are paying for delivery you needed anyway, and the hiring signal falls out of it for free.
Option B

Recruiting engagement

You have a role that needs filling.

  1. Tell us the role

    What you need, and what good actually looks like on your team rather than on a job spec.

  2. First pick of the bench

    Builders between engagements, each with months of paid, senior-reviewed, AI-native client work behind them.

  3. Read the Record

    Every builder arrives with a Record: six dimensions, rated and signed, each linked to real work.

  4. Talk about real work

    A conversation about decisions they actually made under real constraints, not a whiteboard exercise.

  5. Hire

    You are hiring someone the studio has already vouched for, in public, with its own name attached.

No loop to run: no take-home to set, nothing to game. The work already happened, and someone with a reputation signed off on it. See what the Record contains →

light the fire

Hire someone whose work you've already seen.

We're starting deliberately small. Tell us what you need and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.