Seattle

Senior engineering for
Seattle founders

Seattle is the best post-Big-Tech founder market in 2026. Half your engineering pipeline either still works at Amazon or just left. Hiring takes 80+ days because you're bidding against AWS comp — typically $310K base plus RSUs that vest over four years. We work outside that ladder. Flat price, two-week first deploy.

Get a flat-price quote for Senior engineering for Seattle founders

Quote back in 24 hours. No call required first.

Timeline

Day 0

Your product is live on the web

Ownership

Day 0

Source code lands in your GitHub

Price

From $0.0K

Flat-price quote, no retainer

Outcome

Day 0

Your first paying user

How this works

One AI-native engineer.
The output of a team.

One senior engineer plus AI agents now ships what four engineers used to. Same code quality, half the cost, three-week timelines instead of three months. Built for pre-seed to Series A founders in Seattle who need to ship before the next round closes.

The local read

Why this works for Seattle

Seattle founders have access to deep technical talent that's mostly busy. The candidates who do interview want AWS comp, or are leaving to start their own thing. Either way, your 90-day hiring cycle becomes 180.

Different math: one named senior engineer plus AI agents, Pacific Time, ships in two weeks. Flat-price quote after a 30-minute call. AWS-native by default — Bedrock, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 — same stack your team already runs. Code in your GitHub from commit one. Walk away clean at the end.

Seattle's startup infrastructure runs through Techstars Seattle (alumni have raised over $1B post-graduation) and Pioneer Square Labs, backed by Madrona Venture Group — the Pacific Northwest's anchor fund, currently investing out of a $300M Fund VII — plus newer entrants like Founders' Co-op and the $50M Fortson VC fund launched in 2025. The talent density backs it up: CBRE's Scoring Tech Talent report ranked Seattle #2 in North America for tech talent two years running, behind only the Bay Area, with the Puget Sound region adding nearly 25,000 tech jobs between 2022 and 2025. AI is pulling its share too — local AI startups alone raised $679M in the first eight months of 2025. None of that changes the math for a seed-stage founder: Amazon and Microsoft set the local salary floor, and neither is going anywhere.

Seattle's 2025-2026 story is really about churn, not just growth: Amazon cut roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in October 2025, then another 16,000 or so about three months later; Microsoft has cut 15,000+ jobs globally since May 2025, including over 3,200 in Washington state alone. That's a lot of senior engineering talent hitting the market at once — talent that trained at places like the University of Washington's Allen School, tied for #7 nationally in graduate CS with average starting salaries around $110K. On the funding side, Madrona runs Create33, a dedicated founder hub a floor below its own office, and Flying Fish Partners writes $500K-$1.5M pre-seed and seed checks exclusively into AI and ML infrastructure. The city isn't short on engineers right now — it's short on companies moving fast enough to hire them before Amazon or Microsoft does again.

Did you know · Seattle

Amazon employs more people in Seattle than the next nine largest local employers combined.

Time zone

--:--:--

PT

Pacific Time, same window as your team, your customers in Bellevue, and the Big-Tech mafia your investors keep mentioning.

Sectors we work in here

AI and ML infrastructureCloud toolsB2B SaaSEnterprise techDeveloper tools

What you actually get

A working product.
Live in weeks, not quarters.

30-minute call, then a flat-price quote. One named senior engineer from spec to deploy — no hand-offs, no juniors, no "team of three" billed for one person's work. Source code in your GitHub from commit one.

The three builds founders in Seattle ask for most

01

Production web apps in 1 to 4 weeks

Next.jsTypeScript.NETPostgres
02

AI features and LLM integrations

BedrockSageMakerLangChainPinecone
03

Mobile apps for iOS and Android

KotlinSwiftReact Native

Every build ships with

Live production URL

On your domain, day of launch

Your GitHub repo

Code yours from commit 1

Stripe + auth wired

Login, payments, webhooks done

Shared Slack channel

Async updates, same-day replies

Built from Seattle

Founders here shipped these

Real Seattle founders. Real shipped product. Not a stock-photo lineup of "trusted by" logos.

Campaign Refinery
SaaS Platform · 2024

Campaign Refinery

Campaign Refinery is an advanced email marketing and automation platform that focuses on helping businesses send better emails, improve deliverability, and drive real engagement. It combines powerful automation, smart list management, and deep analytics to make email campaigns more effective and easier to manage.

Visit the product

The math

Why founders pick
path B in Seattle

Same shipped product. Different cost, different speed, different risk. Here is how year one plays out.

Hiring in Seattle

Year-one total

before shipping a line of code

$310,000

Time to fill

discovery, interviews, offers, onboarding

60+days

Retention risk

leaves inside year one · 3-month notice

~40%

What's inside the $310,000 year-one cost: Salary $170,500 · Recruiter $49,600 · Benefits $46,500 · Equity $18,600 · Ramp $24,800

Or, with us

From $2.5K.

This week.

Named senior engineer.

One call, one quote, one named engineer. Code in your GitHub from commit one. Walk away at the end clean — no retainer, no notice, nothing held hostage.

Working with us · 9 out of 10 Seattle founders pick this

Skip path A · Start path BDiscovery call free · quote in 24 hours

What we build in Seattle

Six things we ship, all on a flat price

Each one is a focused engagement — one engineer, fixed price, your code from commit one. Pick the closest match and read the city-specific page.

MVP Development in Seattle

Ship a working v1 in two weeks, not two quarters.

from $2,50010–14 days
See mvp development in Seattle

SaaS Development in Seattle

Multi-tenant, billed, deployable. Not a prototype.

from $6,0004–8 weeks
See saas development in Seattle

React & Next.js Engineering in Seattle

Production frontends shipped on a flat price.

from $3,0002–4 weeks
See react & next.js engineering in Seattle

Mobile App Development in Seattle

iOS and Android from one engineer, in your stores in weeks.

from $5,0003–6 weeks to TestFlight
See mobile app development in Seattle

E-Commerce Development in Seattle

Storefronts that convert and checkouts that don't break at scale.

from $3,0002–3 weeks
See e-commerce development in Seattle

Fractional CTO in Seattle

Senior technical leadership without the $300K base.

from $2,000Monthly engagement
See fractional cto in Seattle

AI Product Development in Seattle

LLM features that actually ship to users.

from $4,0002–5 weeks
See ai product development in Seattle

AI-Native Development in Seattle

Agentic tooling as the primary build method. Architecture and review stay human.

from $3,0005–10 days
See ai-native development in Seattle

Vibe Code Rescue in Seattle

Cursor or Claude Code shipped your MVP. We rebuild the engine without throwing the product away.

from $50014 days
See vibe code rescue in Seattle

Agency Transfer in Seattle

Your current dev team stopped shipping. We pick up where they failed and ship in two weeks.

from $50014 days
See agency transfer in Seattle

Cloud Engineering in Seattle

Production cloud infra without the DevOps headcount. CI/CD, observability, secrets management, on-call.

from $2,0007–10 days
See cloud engineering in Seattle

Not in Seattle?

We ship from 11 cities. Worldwide.

Tap any pin to read what working with us looks like from that founder ecosystem. The Seattle pin is where you are now.

Got a question about working from Seattle?

Ask me anything.
Right now.

Real chat. Real answers from our FAQ. If I don't have a clean match, I'll email you back within a day.

Founders here usually ask

  • How fast can you start a build?
  • What does a typical quote look like?
  • Do we own the code from day one?
  • Do you have customers in Seattle?
Usually replies in minutes during working hours
Valery Satsura

Valery Satsura

CEO · Start Matter · usually replies in minutes

Hey, I'm Valery. Ask me anything about working with us from Seattle.

Ship your next thing from Seattle

30-minute discovery. Flat-price quote in 24 hours. Code in your GitHub from commit one. No retainer.

Get a flat-price quote for Senior engineering for Seattle founders

Quote back in 24 hours. No call required first.