Why devtools startups hire Evil Martians
Established nearly 20 years ago, Evil Martians is a trusted software development consultancy for developer tools startups.
Every year we work with about 40 startups, mostly seed to Series B; within one to three years from working with Evil Martians, 65% of companies raise capital.
Startups hire Evil Martians because they need senior design and engineering talent with high agency who can jump in, drive, and ship. We helped StackBlitz build the Rails backend behind bolt.new, one of the fastest-growing AI products ever launched. Teleport and Tines reached unicorn status with Martians on their teams. Evil Martians shipped AI products, developer tools, infrastructure, and security platforms for Recraft, HTTPie, NATS, Wallarm, and many more.
Our clients are backed by YCombinator, a16z, Sequoia, Accel, Conviction, and Heavybit. When a portfolio company needs to move fast after a raise, these investors send them to us because they’ve already seen it work. Conviction, Heavybit, Uncork Capital, SignalFire, and Blossom Capital have each referred multiple startups to Evil Martians.
Hire Evil Martians
Embed senior designers and engineers who ship.
How Evil Martians work
Martian engineers and designers join your team directly: your repo, your Slack, your standups. We work with Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, and React.
Evil Martians run 2–3 week sprints with clear deliverables. We charge $8,000/week per Martian: senior product designers, software engineers, and technical writers, ready to ship from day one. We come when needed and disconnect when the job is done. This means can hire full-time at your own pace, once you’re certain a permanent role is needed.
And when we leave, the work stays. Evil Martians set up architecture, testing patterns, and developer onboarding that your team builds upon long after we’re gone. Years later, engineers at former client companies still tell us they benefit from what we established in the codebase!
Evil Martians always begin with a complimentary exploration call. Your first call will be with Irina (CEO), Victoria (Head of New Business), or Anton (Engineering Manager). Between us, we’ve worked with hundreds of devtools products, so we’re expertly equipped to quickly figure out the right team and scope.
When to hire Evil Martians?
Right after a funding round, when there’s pressure to ship and hiring takes months.
At the scaling stage, when you need specific expertise like performance, real-time infrastructure, or AI integration that doesn’t justify a full-time hire.
Pre-PMF, when you need to validate fast: our design sprints have launched products for Tines, Ghost Security, and HTTPie in as little as two weeks.
Meet Evil Martians
Evil Martians are a team of 50 based in San Francisco and New York, working distributed and async since day one.
Irina Nazarova (CEO) advises devtools founders on growth strategy, product analytics, and business forecasting through a six-month program. She runs the SF Ruby community and speaks internationally about the business of devtools.
Andrey Sitnik created PostCSS, Browserslist, and Nano ID. His tools account for 0.7% of all npm downloads.
Vladimir Dementyev created AnyCable and TestProf, and wrote the best-selling book on Rails architecture.
Anton Lovchikov leads product design with 20 years of experience building developer tool interfaces.
Victoria Melnikova hosts Dev Propulsion Labs, where founders like DHH, Paul Copplestone, and David Cramer share how they built their devtools businesses.
Travis Turner runs our technical blog read by half a million developers every year.
Evil Martians build open source and AI harnesses
Evil Martians have built over 100 open source projects earning 150K+ GitHub stars. Our open source has over 25 billion downloads: PostCSS, imgproxy, AnyCable, Lefthook, Nano ID. Chances are your team already uses something we built.
AI coding tools produce generic code by default. An AI harness encodes your architecture, conventions, and constraints so AI output matches what your team would actually write. For Rails, we ship open source harnesses like Layered Rails skills and Inertia Rails skills. For React and TypeScript, we build anti-slop stacks with contract-first types, strict linting, and CLAUDE.md rules that constrain AI at the source.
