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London & UK · Permanent Placements Only

The recruiter who actually
understands what you're hiring for.

Specialist DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering recruitment for scaling UK tech companies. Founded by a Computer Science graduate who screens on architecture — not keywords.

Start a Search → How it works
3
Max CVs per role. Ever.
3:1
Interview-to-offer ratio
12wk
Sliding scale rebate
100%
Permanent placements only
The Problem

You've been burned by agencies before.

Here's why it keeps happening — and why this is different.

📋

CV dumps, not search

Most agencies send 12 CVs and call it a service. They're outsourcing the screening to you — and charging £20k for it.

🔑

Keyword matching, not engineering

Recruiters who've never written code can't tell a senior engineer from a mid-level one who knows the right buzzwords.

💸

Engineer leaves. Agency keeps the fee.

You get a 4-week rebate. The engineer was misrepresented. You start again. Three months wasted.

📞

Account managers, not founders

You brief the senior person. A junior does the search. The person who understood your problem never touches the role again.

How It Works

A search process built for engineering leaders.

Every search runs the same way. No shortcuts, no exceptions.

01

60-Minute Brief

Not a 10-minute form. We go deep on your stack, team, on-call setup, and what "senior" means at your company.

02

Architectural Screening

Every candidate screened on how they think — not what tools they list. Trade-offs, design decisions, reasoning.

03

Max 3 CVs

Maximum 3 candidates. Each with a written brief on why they're right for this specific role.

04

12-Week Rebate

Sliding scale protection. I stay in contact through notice period and first weeks to reduce drop-off risk.

What We Place

Three roles. Done properly.

We don't place everything. We place three types of engineers and we know them inside out.

DevOps Engineer

CI/CD, IaC, cloud infrastructure, pipeline ownership. Engineers who build — not just maintain.

KubernetesTerraformAWS/GCPGitOpsCI/CD

Site Reliability Engineer

SLO ownership, error budgets, incident response. Real SREs — not DevOps with a different title.

SLO/SLAObservabilityOn-callError Budgets

Platform Engineer

Internal developer platforms, golden paths, self-service infrastructure. The role serious engineering orgs hire.

IDPBackstageService MeshDX

You deal with the founder.
Every time.

John Talent was founded by Yaz A., a Computer Science graduate from Royal Holloway, University of London — with top grades in Information Security and AI/ML.

No junior account managers. No handoffs. The person who takes your brief is the person who runs your search.

More about us →
YA
Yaz A.
Founder · John Talent
BSc Computer Science (Hons)
Royal Holloway, University of London

DevOps · SRE · Platform Engineering

Hiring a senior engineer?
Let's talk.

No pitch. No obligation. Just a conversation about what you're building and what you need.

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