Engineering pods for AI-native startups

Your roadmap is stuck behind a role you can't fill.

Pannicle gives you senior AI, forward-deployed and product engineers who work in your stack and join your standups — embedded in two weeks. No four-month search. No recruiter fee. Scale down whenever you want.

2 weeks to embedded 4–6 hrs overlap with US hours No recruiter fee Monthly rolling — cancel any time
pannicle — match
$pannicle match "Founding AI Engineer"
stackPython · PyTorch · LLMs · AWS
seniority7+ yrs, production ML
overlap4–6 hrs · US Eastern
ip & ndaassigned to you, in writing
trial2 weeks, free replacement
3 engineers ready to interview · in 72 hrs
72 hrs
From scoping call to matched engineer profiles
14 days
From signed to shipping in your repo
1 → 6
Scale a pod up or down with 30 days' notice
2 weeks
Risk-free trial — walk away if the fit is wrong
We work in the stacks you're already hiring for
PythonTypeScriptReact / Next.jsNode.js PostgreSQLAWSGCPAzure PyTorchLLMs & AgentsKubernetesTerraform GoRustRedisReact NativeDjangoMongoDB
The hiring math at seed stage

Hiring a founding engineer is the slowest thing on your roadmap.

You know exactly what you need. The job post has been live for months. And every week it stays open, the release you promised slides another week to the right.

The search eats a quarter

Sourcing, screening, four rounds, an offer, a notice period. A senior AI hire routinely takes a full quarter to close — before they write a line of code.

You're bidding against labs

The engineer you want has an offer from a frontier lab with equity you can't print on a seed round. You lose the ones you like most.

One wrong hire costs two quarters

At eight people, a mis-hire is a tenth of your company, a chunk of runway, and months of rework nobody planned for.

Meanwhile, customers wait

The integration a design partner signed up for is still in a Linear backlog. Momentum is the one thing an early-stage company can't buy back.

You don't need a longer search. You need senior engineering capacity you can turn on this month — and turn off when you've raised and hired.


What you get

Pannicle gives you the engineer, not the search.

Pick the shape of the gap. We match engineers from our bench who have shipped the exact thing before, you interview them yourself, and they embed in your repo, your Slack, your standups — as your team, not a vendor behind a ticket queue.

AI & ML Engineering

The people who take a demo that works on your laptop and make it survive real users, real latency and a real cloud bill.

Typical work
  • LLM apps, agent orchestration and tool use
  • RAG pipelines, retrieval quality and eval harnesses
  • Fine-tuning, distillation and inference cost tuning
  • Voice and multimodal pipelines
  • Data and ML infrastructure, training jobs, MLOps
Roles we fill
  • Founding AI Engineer · AI Agent Engineer
  • Applied AI / AI Research Engineer
  • ML Engineer · Data Scientist
PythonPyTorchTensorFlow Hugging FaceLangGraphvLLM Vector DBsSageMakerVertex AI

Forward Deployed Engineering

Half solutions engineer, half backend engineer. They sit with your customer, learn their mess of a schema, and ship the integration that closes the deal.

Typical work
  • Customer-facing implementation and onboarding builds
  • Data mapping, ETL and warehouse integrations
  • Custom connectors, SSO and OAuth wiring
  • Turning one-off customer hacks into product
  • Pre-sales technical depth on live calls
Roles we fill
  • Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
  • Solutions / Implementation Engineer
  • Integrations Engineer
PythonTypeScriptSQL GoPostgreSQLSnowflake dbtAirflowREST / gRPC

Product Engineering

The product around the model. Full-stack engineers, plus the DevOps and QA to keep shipping weekly without breaking things.

Typical work
  • Web app and dashboard builds, front to back
  • Mobile apps — React Native or native iOS / Android
  • APIs, auth, billing, multi-tenancy
  • Cloud infra, CI/CD, observability, SOC 2 groundwork
  • QA automation and release engineering
Roles we fill
  • Founding / Senior Full-Stack Engineer
  • Backend · Frontend · Mobile Engineer
  • DevOps / Platform Engineer · QA Automation
ReactNext.jsNode.js DjangoPostgreSQLRedis AWSKubernetesTerraform

Stack coverage

No ramp-up tax on tools you already use.

Every engineer we place has shipped production work in the stack you interview them on. If it isn't on this list, ask — the bench is wider than the page.

AI & Data

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • Hugging Face
  • LangChain
  • LangGraph
  • vLLM
  • OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Pinecone
  • pgvector
  • Spark
  • dbt
  • Airflow
  • Snowflake
  • BigQuery

Backend

  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Django
  • FastAPI
  • Go
  • Rust
  • Java
  • Ruby on Rails
  • .NET
  • GraphQL
  • gRPC
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB
  • DynamoDB
  • Redis

Frontend & Mobile

  • React
  • Next.js
  • Vue
  • Svelte
  • Tailwind
  • React Native
  • Swift / SwiftUI
  • Kotlin
  • Flutter
  • Expo
  • Three.js
  • D3

Cloud & Platform

  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Azure
  • Vercel
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • GitHub Actions
  • Datadog
  • Grafana
  • Kafka
  • Temporal

How it works

Scoping call Monday. Code review Friday, two weeks on.

Four steps, no procurement theatre. You keep every decision — we just remove the search.

01
DAY 0

20-minute scoping call

Your stack, the gap, the first thing you need shipped. We tell you honestly whether we're the right fit — sometimes we aren't.

02
DAY 3

Matched profiles in 72 hours

Two or three engineers with production experience in your exact stack. Full CVs, code samples, rates. No blind resumes.

03
DAY 5–7

You interview. You decide.

Run your own loop — technical screen, pairing session, whatever you'd do for a full-time hire. Say no as many times as you need to.

04
DAY 14

Embedded and shipping

In your repo, Slack and standups, with a two-week trial window. If the fit is wrong, you don't pay for it.


The honest comparison

Three ways to add an engineer this quarter.

A full-time hire is the right answer for your core team long term. It's the wrong answer when you need someone shipping in a fortnight.

Full-time hire Freelance marketplace Pannicle pod
Time to first commit3–5 months1–3 weeks2 weeks
Up-front costRecruiter fee, 15–25% of salaryPlatform marginNone — monthly, in arrears
If it isn't workingMonths of performance managementRe-post and start overWe replace them, at our cost
Scaling downLayoffContract ends abruptly30 days' notice
Seniority you can accessWhoever accepts your offerHighly variablePre-vetted seniors only
Working hours overlapFullWhatever they choose4–6 hrs with US hours, guaranteed
Continuity & handoverStrongUsually noneDocumented, pod covers absences
Code & IP ownershipYoursCheck the termsYours, assigned in writing

Engagement models

Start with one engineer. Grow into a pod.

Flat monthly rate per engineer, billed in arrears. No setup fee, no recruiter fee, no minimum term beyond the first month.

Dedicated engineer

1 engineer · from 1 month

One senior engineer, full-time on your product, reporting to you. The fastest way to unblock a single roadmap item.

  • You interview and approve them
  • Your tools, your process, your standups
  • Two-week trial, free replacement
  • Convert to your payroll any time
Get a rate card
Most common

Engineering pod

3–6 engineers + tech lead

A squad that owns a whole surface — the AI layer, the mobile app, the integrations backlog — with a lead who runs delivery so you don't have to.

  • Tech lead included, no extra charge
  • Mixed seniority to keep the rate sane
  • Weekly demo, sprint reports you can forward to your board
  • Swap skills in and out as the roadmap moves
Scope a pod

Fixed-scope build

Defined outcome · fixed price

A clear deliverable with a clear number — an MVP, a migration, an integration, a security-review-ready refactor.

  • Fixed price, fixed milestones
  • Paid milestone by milestone
  • Handover docs and a walkthrough at the end
  • 30 days of bug cover after delivery
Get a quote

Straight answers

The questions founders actually ask.

How much overlap will I get with my working hours? +
Every engineer commits to a minimum four to six hours of overlap with your working day, written into the engagement. For US East Coast teams that usually means our engineers start in the late afternoon India time and work into your morning; West Coast teams get a later shift. Standups, pairing and incident response all happen live — not over a 12-hour email lag.
Who owns the code and the IP? +
You do, unconditionally. IP assignment is signed before anyone touches your repo, and it covers everything produced during the engagement. We'll sign your NDA and your MSA rather than insisting on our paperwork, and we're used to security questionnaires from enterprise customers and investors.
What if the engineer isn't good enough? +
There's a two-week trial on every placement. If you're not convinced in that window, you don't pay for the time and we don't argue about it. After the trial, if performance drops we replace the engineer at our cost and cover the handover. You interviewed them in the first place, so this is rare — but the guarantee is the point.
How do you vet engineers? +
Three filters before you ever see a profile: a live technical screen against the stack on their CV, a code review of real production work, and reference checks with people who shipped alongside them. We only send engineers we would put on our own product. Then you run your own loop on top — we never ask you to accept someone sight unseen.
Can I hire them onto my payroll later? +
Yes, and we don't punish you for it. If an engineer becomes core to your team and everyone wants it, we'll work out a clean conversion. We'd rather you keep a great engineer and come back to us for the next gap than block a good outcome with a buyout clause.
We're pre-seed and watching every dollar. Is this for us? +
Sometimes yes, sometimes no — we'll tell you on the call. If you need one senior engineer for eight weeks to hit a milestone that unlocks a round, a pod is usually cheaper and faster than a hire. If you need a co-founder-level owner for the long haul, that's an equity conversation and we'll say so.
How is this different from an offshore dev shop? +
A dev shop takes a spec and returns a build, with a project manager between you and the engineers. Our engineers are in your Slack, on your board, in your code reviews, and you talk to them directly every day. You manage priorities; we handle employment, retention and cover. If you want a black box, we're the wrong choice.
How quickly can we actually start? +
Profiles in 72 hours from the scoping call, interviews inside the first week, and a start date within two weeks of you saying yes. If your need is genuinely urgent and someone on the bench matches exactly, we've started in five days — but two weeks is what we'll promise you.
Next step

Every week the role stays open is a week of roadmap you don't get back.

If you've got an engineering role you can't fill and a release you can't move, a 20-minute call is the cheapest thing you'll do this week. We'll scope the gap, tell you what a pod would cost, and tell you plainly if you're better off hiring.

No sales deck No obligation Straight answer on fit