Hire top 1% AI-native developers across 30 stacks

Up to 2 weeks from signed agreement. Engineers from our existing team can typically be assigned the same week. For niche stacks or seniorities where we do not have an immediate match, we may need 2 to 4 weeks to onboard a new hire who passes our four-stage vetting funnel.

Every Unico Connect engineer is a full-time employee who passed our multi-stage hiring funnel: an initial filter for stack, experience, and English; a recruiter screen for communication and motivation; a 90-minute live coding plus system-design interview; and a third-party background verification covering employment, education, and identity. Less than 1% of applicants make it onto the team. You are not getting an anonymous marketplace freelancer. You are getting our employee.

We follow your team's existing process. Your standups, your code review workflow, your project tools (Jira, Linear, GitHub). The engineer reports to your tech lead day-to-day and is supported by a Unico Connect engagement manager who handles HR, performance reviews, and contract issues in the background. That manager takes around 4 to 6 hours of your senior engineers' time per month, far less than managing freelancers directly typically requires.

We offer a 30-day replacement guarantee. If the engineer is not the right fit for skills, communication, or culture, we replace them at no additional cost. Beyond 30 days, we still work with you on replacements through the engagement manager, scoped case-by-case.

Yes. We require a 3-month initial engagement so the engineer has time to onboard into your codebase, ship meaningful work, and prove fit. After 3 months, billing continues monthly and you can scale the team up or down freely.

Unico Connect rates run $25 to $50 per hour, all-in, depending on seniority and stack. By comparison, a US senior engineer costs $115 to $160 per hour fully loaded (salary, taxes, benefits, recruiter fees, ramp time), and freelance platforms typically charge $60 to $200 per hour plus platform fees, deposits, and contract initiation costs. The Unico Connect rate is your final rate. No setup fees, no recruiter fees, no surprise line items.

Yes. Most Unico Connect engagements involve 2 to 8 engineers across complementary stacks (for example: 1 backend, 2 frontend, 1 DevOps). We co-design the team composition with you based on the project, then assign engineers from our existing team. If a role needs a stack we do not currently have on the team, we open a new hiring funnel for it.

All engineers are based in India (IST · UTC+5:30). Standard working hours of 9am to 7pm IST give you 4 hours of overlap with US East, 3 hours with US Central, 6 hours with UK and Europe, and full overlap with UAE, Singapore, and Australia. For US West and Pacific markets, we run a hybrid sync and async cadence: daily standup in the client time zone, deep work follows IST.

Every engagement assigns 100% IP and source-code ownership to the customer on signing of the master agreement. Code is developed in customer-owned repositories (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) where possible, with isolated branches per engagement. Engineers sign individual NDAs in addition to the company NDA.

Unico Connect is ISO 27001:2022 certified for information security management and ISO 9001:2015 certified for quality management. We are GDPR-aligned and follow ISMS policies covering access control, data classification, and incident response. All engineers sign individual NDAs, and we provide audit-ready documentation for enterprise procurement teams.

No. We do not offer a free trial period. Instead we offer a 30-day replacement guarantee: if the engineer is not the right fit in the first 30 days, we replace them at no additional cost. This works better than trials because it covers fit issues that often only surface after week two, when the engineer has had time to integrate.

Three differences buyers tell us matter most: (1) Transparent hourly pricing published on this page. Most competitors gate pricing behind "request a quote." (2) Engineers are full-time Unico Connect employees, not a marketplace bench, so you get the same engineers across engagements and lower churn. (3) The Unico Connect rate is all-in. No platform fees, no deposits, no recruiter fees, no markup on the engagement manager.