Hiring senior engineers across three time zones

Kwame: Femi, why three cities? Femi: Because the talent we needed did not cluster in one city. Senior backend engineers were thickest in Lagos. The strongest data engineers we found were in Nairobi. Cape Town gave us a depth of senior staff engineers that, frankly, neither of the other two cities matched. So we let the talent shape the geography and we built the organization around that. Adaobi: Talk to us about the loop. Femi: Four stages. A take-home that takes about three hours and is realistic to our actual work. A system design conversation that is open-ended. A behavioral round focused on conflict resolution because that is what fails most senior hires. A bar-raiser final with a director who has never met the candidate. We measured this loop for two years. It generates roughly a four-week time-to-offer and a positive hire rate of about thirty percent of final-stage candidates. That is the right shape for us. Kwame: Compensation? Femi: Single global band, location-adjusted by a published multiplier. We do not negotiate the multiplier. We publish it. People know what they will be paid before they apply. The transparency saves us a week per offer and the trust it generates is immeasurable. Adaobi: Career ladders that travel? Femi: One ladder. Three locations. Same expectations at every level. We could not afford to fragment the leveling because then promotion to staff in Lagos means something different than promotion to staff in Cape Town. That ambiguity poisons culture. So we publish the ladder, calibrate twice a year, and live with the heated discussions. Kwame: The two-hour overlap rule? Femi: Every team must have at least two hours of overlap with every other team they collaborate with. That is the only synchronous time we mandate. The rest is asynchronous. The rule sounds simple. Enforcing it shaped how we hire, who reports to whom, and which projects we say yes to. It is the highest-leverage rule we have. Adaobi: What broke in year two? Femi: Documentation. The two-hour rule only works if everyone documents. In year one, we had thirty engineers and everyone documented because they had to. In year two we had ninety and the culture frayed. We had to introduce a documentation review step in every PR and a quarterly audit of team handbooks. Painful, but necessary. Kwame: Femi, thanks. Femi: Anytime.