Algora / Thesis
Open source work is the strongest hiring signal
A merged pull request in a project with real maintainers tells you more about an engineer than a resume. This is why we hire on it, where it falls short, and how we answer the objections we hear most.
01 Reviewed work in public
A resume is written by the candidate. An interview is a few hours on a problem picked for the occasion.
A merged pull request in a project with real maintainers is a different kind of evidence. Someone else reviewed the code, asked for changes and accepted it, in public.
Anyone can read that record: the code, the review discussion, and how the engineer handled feedback. For many engineers it covers years of work.
Code that was reviewed and accepted in public beats a self-reported history.
02 The best engineers don't apply
Many of the best engineers never apply to jobs. A job board only reaches the people who are looking. So we find engineers through their contributions instead.
Gergő Móricz joined Firecrawl while he was in high school and Firecrawl was a prototype. He became the #1 contributor to its 185k+ star repo, with 1,763 commits, as Firecrawl grew to 150,000 companies. A filter on degrees or years of experience would have passed over him.
03 The work can come before the interview
Golem Cloud needed an initial file system for Golem, its open source platform written in Rust. It published the spec in its public repository, and engineers built against it in the open.
Maxim Schuwalow's pull request was reviewed by Golem's maintainers and merged about four weeks after the spec went up. He was paid $15,000 for the work, and Golem hired him. He is now Lead Engineer at Golem Cloud.
Before his first interview, Golem's team had already reviewed thousands of lines of his code in their own codebase.
- 9,841
- Lines merged Lines of code merged
- 181
- Files changed
- $15k
- Paid for work Paid for the work
04 What we look at
- Reviewed contributions
- Pull requests merged into projects with real maintainers, where the code had to pass someone else's review.
- Experience and background
- Where the engineer has worked, what they built there, and what they studied.
- Fit with your job description
- The tech stack, location and compensation of your role, and the kind of work it involves.
- Your feedback
- Likes, passes, notes, interview feedback and the profiles of your past hires.
Each company's agent is backtested against known outcomes, so that hired candidates rank above archived ones.
05 What it has produced
- 30+
- Engineers placed Full-time engineers placed
- 100%
- First-year retention
- 100+
- Customers
06 Where this does not apply
The signal is strong where it exists. It does not exist for everyone.
- Engineers whose best work is private
- Many strong engineers have spent their careers in closed codebases, and their public record says little about them. We still rank them on experience and background, but the evidence is thinner.
- Activity without review
- Commit counts, stars and personal repositories are easy to inflate. The signal comes from code that someone else had to review and accept.
- Roles where code is a small part of the job
- For roles that are mostly people management or customer facing, a contribution history covers only part of what matters.
- Short contract work
- Algora places engineers full-time. The paid trial is a step before an offer, and does not replace one.
07 Common objections
What engineering leaders ask us most, and how we answer.
- Most great engineers don't contribute to open source.
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Many don't. Open source work raises our confidence when it exists. We also rank on experience and background, and Screening scores every applicant in your pipeline.
- Open source contributors won't want a full-time job.
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30+ engineers have joined our customers full-time through Algora, with 100% first-year retention. Gergő has been at Firecrawl for two years and is a core member of the team.
- A GitHub profile is easy to game.
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Activity on your own repositories is. A merged pull request in a project with real maintainers had to get through their review. That is the work we look for.
- Our code is private, so open source work says nothing about fit.
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Public work shows how someone writes code, responds to review and works to another team's standards. Fit with your role comes from ranking against your job description. You still interview, and you can run a paid trial before an offer.
- Our stack or domain is too niche.
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Candidates are ranked against your job description, including the tech stack. ComfyUI needed a backend engineer with creative media experience. It hired Matt Miller, who led the development and release of Comfy MCP within 7 months.
- We could search GitHub ourselves.
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You can. Finding contributors, judging their work, checking their fit and reaching them takes time. Our team does that work and sends you the engineers who fit. You pay only when you hire.
Keep reading
- How it works The steps from job description to hire, the two offerings and pricing.
- Customer stories Engineers placed at CodeRabbit, ComfyUI and Firecrawl, with the numbers attached.
- About Algora Who we are, how we got here, and how we work.
- FAQ Short answers on pricing, candidates, Screening and working with us.
- Algora compared How Algora differs from sourcing tools, AI recruiters and recruiter marketplaces.
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