As working landscapes go virtual, the need for engineers to develop that landscape grows with it.

Turing, an up-and-coming hiring platform, wants to see that those developers can come from anywhere. Using their Talent Cloud to automatically vet, source, and manage engineers across the globe, they offer access to international developers based on their certified skills rather than where they graduated.

“We lived in this Silicon Valley monoculture for a long time where there was a certain type of person, who went to a certain type of school, who was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, who had access to the Silicon Valley opportunity,” Turing Co-Founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth told SDxCentral.

“Today with companies like Turing, we're democratizing access to opportunity to the entire planet.”

Currently touting over 1.5 million developers, over 150 represented countries, and over 300 customers, Turing reports 75% of customers get “pre-vetted, timezone-friendly, senior developers within 3-5 days.”

The vetting engine looks at a variety of job types [i.e. frontend, DevOps], with a variety of training and skills [i.e. React Node, Python, C Sharp], and finally Silicon valley-based engineering ladders [i.e. Ic4, Technical Lead] to effectively source the platform's developers.  

“Where you’re born doesn’t get to dictate where you work anymore,” Siddharth said.

Turing started in 2018 when Siddharth and Co-Founder Vijay Krishnan turned a pivotal takeaway from their previous venture into a vision.

Krishnan and Siddharth’s former company, Rover, was a machine learning-based content discovery engine. Fresh out of Stanford, Siddharth believed the company was set to fail in 2012.

While raising Series A funding, he recalled driving up and down Sand Hill Road, and “almost every VC slammed the door.” They all wanted to see mobile traction.

Seeing the need for an iOS developer, Siddharth recalled numerous phone calls to key U.S. connections with strong mobile talent, all to no avail. “It was very hard to join a startup at the time because it was very difficult to recruit from that Silicon Valley pool. And I realized if we didn't change the game, we were gonna die.”

At a crucial time, Siddharth acknowledged their fortune in being able to connect and work with engineers from Ukraine, Poland, and Serbia to develop iOS momentum.

When the first version of the company’s iPhone app shipped out, “it was a massive hit.” The company was later acquired by content discovery network RevContent.

“That lesson stuck with me,” Siddharth explained. “That decision to shift [and] not limit our hiring radius to the small pool that is Silicon Valley, but widen it to the entire planet… now it seems obvious, but in 2012 it wasn't obvious.”

Now measured at a $4B valuation cap, Turing is the product of that lingering lesson. Siddharth describes the company as “an index of the broader tech industry.”

With the world driven by digitalization, “every company has to become a software company,” he said, and the subsequent massive scaling leaves a great need for engineers and developers.

Thus far, Turing sees highest traffic for full stack developers, backend developers, and ML engineers, though Siddharth feels because the vetting engine is used to match across so many sectors, they “see it all.”

Siddharth added that companies in SaaS, health care, and crypto (before a cool down in the last year) are frequently seeking developers on their platform.

“Typically we see geo preferences from companies in financial services [and] health care that are handling sensitive data,” Siddharth explained. But even in those cases, he is happy to see that those big roles can now be filled by someone in rural Kansas rather than the Bay Area.

Siddharth explained that companies have come to Turing to help progress with their DE&I hiring initiatives as well.

Turing’s working team includes people from over 40 countries. “I think it’s very important that technology touches people of all backgrounds, and it’s important that it’s built by people of all backgrounds,” he said.

Part of his and Turing’s step toward making that a reality is shifting away from interview processes that Siddharth believes are often biased, inconsistent, and subjective rather than data-driven – a “luck of the draw” for the interviewees.

“We built this automated, coding-based vetting process where we just assess people's skills. We don't care where they went to school,” he said.

Siddharth ultimately wants Turing to “be value positive for a developer.” If a developer isn’t able to get sourced to a company from gaps in their experience, Turing gives access to resources where they can get free training and online courses for the areas that need supplementation.

“Because we have so much data across the industry, we can tell for example, if you're a frontend developer, pick React not Angular. If you're a machine learning engineer, pick TensorFlow and PyTorch not MXNet,” he explained.

Siddharth wants Turing to help give developers access to understanding “what technologies are the ascendancy [and] what technologies are waning,” so they can focus on training that will get them work, wherever they’re based.