The handoff is where
the week goes.
Hire someone who removes it.
One engineer who can take a ticket from database column to keyboard-accessible screen, write the tests, and put it behind a flag. Full-time in your team, on our payroll, from $30 an hour.
“Add a status column and let people filter by it”
Nine layers. In a split team this ticket touches five people, three queues and at least two waiting periods. A full-stack engineer does the whole descent in one pass, and the middle rows — the ones nobody owns — stop being skipped.
Clarify the requirement
normally: Product / BAReads the ticket, spots that “export the report” means three different things, asks once.
Design the schema change
normally: Backend leadAdds the column, decides whether it is nullable, and thinks about the backfill before writing it.
Write the migration
normally: DBA / backendReversible, tested against a copy of production volume, with a lock-time estimate.
Build the endpoint
normally: BackendTyped request and response, validation at the boundary, pagination that survives 100k rows.
Handle the errors
normally: Nobody, usuallyTimeouts, partial failures and the empty state — the parts that get skipped when work is split.
Build the interface
normally: Front-endThe screen, the loading state, the error state, and the keyboard path through both.
Wire the types end to end
normally: Front-end + backendOne shared contract, so a rename on the server is a compile error in the browser rather than a bug in production.
Write the tests
normally: QAA unit test on the rule, an integration test on the endpoint, one end-to-end test on the path a user takes.
Ship and watch it
normally: DevOpsBehind a flag, with a dashboard panel and an alert, and the flag removed a week later.
Five owners, three queues, two hand-back cycles.
Or one person, one pass.
Three things a vendor will not usually tell you
A full-stack hire is not two hires
One person carrying a feature end to end is faster than two people passing it between them — up to a point. Past roughly four concurrent workstreams you want specialists, and we will tell you when you have reached it.
Everyone is deeper on one side
Genuinely equal depth across the whole stack is rare enough that claiming it is a warning sign. Every profile we send names the stronger side explicitly.
They are worth most on small teams
Startups, internal tools, a second product line, a team of three. That is where removing the handoff is worth more than the specialist depth you trade away.
Pick the back end, we match the front
What each band actually carries
Mid-level
3–5 yrs$30–36/hrCarries a well-defined feature across the stack with review at the schema and the security boundary.
Senior
5–8 yrs$36–44/hrTakes a vague requirement and returns a shipped, tested, observable feature. Usually the first hire on a small product team.
Lead
8+ yrs$44–60/hrSets the architecture and the conventions, and mentors the rest of the team into them.
Describe the product, not the job title
Tell us what it does and who uses it. We will come back with the right blend — and say so plainly if what you actually need is two specialists.