How Eve Found the Engineer Who Set the Bar for Every Fire After Him

How do you know you have found the right engineer? The next time you open a role, you describe exactly that person.

1 engineer became the benchmark for every hire after him. Francisco performed so well that when the next engineering role opened, the brief was simple: find someone like him.

About Eve

Eve is an AI platform for plaintiff law firms, helping legal teams move faster and work smarter on the cases that matter most. Backed by a16z, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Menlo Ventures, the company raised $103M in Series B funding at a $1B valuation and now serves more than 1,400 firms. The engineering team has grown roughly tenfold in a year to keep pace with demand.

Kaushik, Data Platform Lead, joined after building Compliant LLM, a Y Combinator-backed AI security and compliance startup, and before that as an engineer at Google. He applies the same technical bar to every hire, whether they are based in San Mateo or São Paulo.

The Challenge

A four-person engineering team does not have room for a hire that does not think. At Eve, engineers work on complex, high-stakes systems where the expectation is not execution against a spec but ownership of the problem from start to finish. Previous contractors and outsourced hires had tested that expectation and come up short.

"Engineers and contractors that we hired from other sources, we have found them to often lack in professionalism and it has been a lot more challenging to work with them and to have them do the relatively complex engineering work that we do." — Kaushik, Data Platform Lead at Eve

The constraint was not geography. It was a signal-to-noise problem: finding contractors who operated at startup pace, took ownership without being asked, and could hold their own against engineers from Google, LinkedIn, and Uber on a live coding screen.

The Solution

Eve put every Remotely candidate through the same interview process as a full-time hire. A take-home assignment. A live coding exercise. A conversation about past projects and technical decisions. No exceptions, no shortcuts.

Francisco came through that process and cleared every stage.

"He took a take-home assignment and did great on that. He did a live coding exercise. We also spoke to him about his past projects and his experience. Through all of these conversations, we could see that he's a great candidate. He was really good at coding, he did a great job on his assignment, and he's done a lot of cool work in the past." — Kaushik, Data Platform Lead at Eve

What followed confirmed what the interviews had suggested. Francisco does not wait to be directed. He surfaces problems, works through them, and comes back with solutions.

"He takes ownership of tasks and I don't really have to tell him to do things. He comes to me with problems and solves them by himself." — Kaushik, Data Platform Lead at Eve

Francisco's performance set a standard. When the next engineering role opened on the integrations team, the description was simple: someone like Francisco.

Looking Ahead

For Kaushik, the argument for Remotely is practical and direct. It is not about cost or geography. It is about access to a caliber of engineer that small teams cannot reliably find anywhere else, without the overhead that would otherwise make cross-border hiring impractical.

"Remotely gives companies everywhere access to great talent in Latin America and provides an easy process to hire them without having to go through all the legal and other processes required to hire people from a different country." — Kaushik, Data Platform Lead at Eve

Key Results

Ownership without management overhead. Problems surface, get solved, and get closed without direction from the team lead.

Zero cross-border hiring complexity. Remotely handled the legal, compliance, and equipment infrastructure for hiring outside the US.

A hiring standard built around the quality of the previous hire. When the integrations team role opened, Eve did not write a new job description from scratch. That performance consolidated a new standard: the quality of the last hire became the floor for the next one.