Haya
Consultant · relationships
Owns every relationship: qualification, briefs, candidate care and the honest phone call. If you talk to Merit, you talk to Haya.
LinkedIn ↗Every candidate we send you has already been interviewed by a senior engineer.
Merit by Design is a two-person recruitment agency for permanent technology hires in the UK.
The method
How it works
- The brief. Haya works out with you what the job actually is, what would prove someone can do it, and what it pays.
- The search. We approach people we can vouch for and ask them first. No names move without consent.
- The assessment. Adam spends 45 minutes with each candidate on their real work, and writes down what held up, what did not, and what he did not get to.
- The shortlist. A short list, with a written report on each person. There is one below.
- Aftercare. We check in on day one, week one and month one.
claim
“Led the migration of our payments platform to event sourcing.”
probe
Which failure made you regret the design, and what did you change?
evidence
Named the outage, the idempotency bug and the replay fix. First-hand, specific, consistent under probing.
assessment
Technical depth 4/5. Production evidence, honest about the trade-offs.
unknown
Kubernetes internals: not tested. Marked, not assumed.
What you receive
Most agencies say they vet. This is what ours looks like.
Every shortlisted candidate arrives with a two-page brief like this one. The candidate here is a composite; the format is exactly what you would receive.
Merit by Design
Candidate brief / role suitability
Our view for this role
J. M.
Senior Backend Engineer at a Series B payments company
The short answer
Worth a serious conversation
Strong distributed-systems evidence, first-hand and consistent under probing. Kubernetes internals went untested; the role runs on managed EKS, so we would weight that lightly. Leadership evidence is thinner than the CV suggests.
78
Role view / 100
A decision aid, not a substitute for the evidence below.
Merit’s judgement
What we came away thinking
An engineer who has carried a payments ledger through a real outage and can say what they would do differently now. Quietly spoken, so give the interview room for that. Notice period is the practical constraint.
The role, tested
What the conversation actually established
-
Evidenced
Event-sourced systems in production
Led the migration of a payments ledger to event sourcing. Named the replay outage, the idempotency bug and the fix. First-hand and specific.
-
Evidenced
Postgres at scale
Partitioning and vacuum tuning on a multi-terabyte ledger, with numbers. Clear about the limits of what had been tried.
-
Partly tested
Leading a team of five
Has led two engineers through a delivery. Has not run hiring or performance conversations. Would need support here.
-
Not tested
Kubernetes internals
Not covered in 45 minutes. Marked, not assumed.
Merit by Design · private and confidential
1 / 2
Page two carries direct quotations from the conversation, Adam’s scores across five competencies, what would change the decision, and the practical details: notice, location, pay position.
Assessments expire after six months. Stale evidence is redone before anyone is put forward.
The terms, up front
What it costs, and what we promise.
Fee
Contingency. If we do not place, you do not pay. The percentage and payment terms are agreed in writing before we start, and you will hear the number on the first call.
Guarantee
Replacement first. If an early hire fails, our default is to run the search again. The window and remedy are set out in the Terms of Business you will have before anything starts.
Exclusivity
Not required. We work contingency by default; retained or exclusive is available if you would prefer it.
What exactly do we receive?
A short list of assessed candidates. Each comes with the two-page brief above, the CV, and confirmation that the candidate has agreed to this specific introduction.
How do you handle data?
UK GDPR throughout. CVs stored with EU data residency, consent recorded per introduction, retention reviewed on a schedule. No decision that significantly affects a person is made by software alone.
Do you use AI?
As a drafting tool. Software may organise the first draft of a report; a named human checks every quotation against the source and owns the judgement. No candidate is rejected, submitted or ranked by a machine.
The founders
Two people. No handoffs.
The person who takes your brief is the person who works it.
Photo · Haya and Adam
Adam
Technical assessor · engineering
Principal engineer with twelve years in regulated payments. Ran engineering at Orbital, growing the team from four to twenty-five, and most recently built a GBP-stablecoin platform inside the FCA’s regulatory sandbox. Rust, Python, TypeScript; ledgers and distributed systems.
Runs every technical assessment personally, one conversation at a time.
LinkedIn ↗A note from Adam
I have built and run engineering teams, and hired for them: at Orbital I grew the team from four to twenty-five. I know how little a CV tells you, and how much a 45-minute conversation about real work does. So I have that conversation with every candidate myself. It does not scale, and that is rather the point: it is the one part of recruitment I would trust if I were the one hiring. If we put someone in front of you, I have talked to them, and I will tell you what I could not test.
Adam
For candidates
Be judged on what you can do.
Free to you, always; the hiring company pays. Nothing leaves us without your yes, and we name the company and the role before we ask. What we did not test is marked unknown, never scored against you.
Open searches are posted on LinkedIn, where they stay current.
Send us the brief that’s been hard to fill.
Twenty minutes is enough to tell whether we can help. If we can’t, we’ll say so.
haya@meritbydesign.com