About
Shyk Systems has been placing engineers since 2021, out of one office in Kraków, and today runs 6 active engagements with 21 full-time engineers. What follows is the composition of that group — experience, tenure, English, and the share of it that leaves in a year — because that is what the decision actually turns on.
Fourteen are senior engineers who write code full time, four are team leads who carry an account as well as a keyboard, and three are mid-level engineers, each placed on a team that already has a lead on it. We do not put junior engineers on client work, which is the main reason the company has grown by single digits a year rather than doubling.
Median experience is 9 years and median tenure here is 2.8 years. For a company founded in 2021 that means most of the team has been through more than one engagement together, and that the person on the CV has been on our payroll long enough for us to know how they work rather than how they interview.
Annual attrition is 11%. Across 21 people that is roughly two engineers a year, and on a four-person team running 14 months the odds of it touching the account are real. We publish the number because the alternative — claiming it does not happen — falls apart the first time it does. When it happens, the replacement overlaps the leaver for three weeks and you are invoiced for one seat, not two; the mechanics are written out in full.
English is assessed against B2+ for engineers and C1 for team leads, in the first call rather than from a line on a CV, because the whole arrangement runs on written standups and pull request comments. Everyone is in Central and Eastern Europe and everyone is on the payroll of one EU entity, which is also the entity you sign the MSA and each SOW with. Nobody is a contractor found for a particular order.
Five kinds of work get a no on the first call rather than a proposal: engagements shorter than three months, fixed price against an undefined scope, mobile application development, single-engineer trials shorter than four weeks, and any engagement without a named technical counterpart on your side. The reasoning against each one is on the services page.
Inbound and referral only — no agencies, no bench recruiting. Three stages: a 45-minute screening call where English is assessed, a two-hour paired session on real code from a retired engagement, and a conversation with the team lead the hire would report to. Roughly 1 in 30 applicants gets an offer, and every hire spends two weeks on our internal tooling before touching a client repository.
21 engineers, 6 active clients, and no bench: the seats that open next are the ones coming off engagements that are finishing. The first call tells you which those are and when, which is sometimes five or six weeks out.
