Hire Tool and Die Designer

When you tally recruiter fees, job-board ads, relocation, onboarding time and employee taxes, hiring a Tool Design engineer in-house regularly exceeds $18,000 before the first drawing is released. Add in medical benefits, retention bonuses, software licenses and idle capacity between projects, and your total annual burden can reach 1.6-2× salary. By contrast, smartbrain.io’s Hire Tool and Die Designer model gives you pre-vetted talent at a transparent hourly rate that already includes payroll, hardware and CAD licensing. You pay only for productive hours, scale up or down with 30-day notice, and avoid severance costs. Most clients realise 25-40 % total savings while gaining faster access to niche die-design expertise.

Every engagement begins with a mutual NDA drafted to match your internal policy. Our Tool Design engineers work inside isolated VDI environments that block local downloads and external media, while version-controlled cloud repositories log every file change. smartbrain.io is SOC-2 Type II audited, maintains zero-trust network segmentation, and enforces device-level encryption plus multi-factor authentication. We can integrate with your VPN, SSO and PLM permissions, ensuring the same—or higher—security posture you apply to in-house staff. All IP rights and source files transfer to you automatically upon invoice payment, eliminating ownership ambiguity.

No. We curate talent pools across North America, Latin America and Eastern Europe, allowing overlap with U.S. morning or afternoon hours. During onboarding we confirm at least four overlapping hours with your core team, set standing Scrum touchpoints, and enforce a 2-hour SLA on Slack or Teams messages. Many clients report better responsiveness than from internal teams that juggle multiple projects. For 24/7 coverage, we can staff staggered shifts so critical die-set updates progress overnight, accelerating iterations without overtime premiums.

smartbrain.io offers monthly, quarterly and annual agreements. Our most popular model is a rolling monthly contract with a simple 30-day exit clause—no penalties, no questions asked. Need to scale from one to four Hire Tool and Die Designer specialists for a peak prototype push? We can expand headcount within days and scale back once production tooling is approved. Long-term discounts apply for six-month commitments, giving finance teams predictable OPEX while preserving agility.

Every applicant completes a five-stage process: (1) portfolio screening for complex die-set work, (2) CAD assessment in CATIA/SolidWorks, (3) GD&T theory exam, (4) live problem-solving interview with a senior Tool Design engineer, and (5) culture-fit evaluation by our engagement manager. Only the top 3 % enter our talent cloud. You receive a shortlist with recorded assessments, reference checks and a downloadable skills matrix, cutting your internal evaluation time to under an hour.

Our replacement guarantee activates immediately. Notify your account manager within the first 14 days and we will deliver another vetted Tool Design specialist at no extra cost. Historical data shows fewer than 2 % of placements require replacement, yet the safety net removes all hiring risk. We also gather fortnightly feedback to catch misalignments early and keep productivity high.

On average, clients hold their first interview within 48 hours of the discovery call and have a Hire Tool and Die Designer resource on-board inside three business days. Critical path projects can be fast-tracked: we’ve deployed emergency coverage for a failing die-set in under 24 hours by tapping our standby talent bench. Because contracts and NDAs are templated, legal review is minimal—simply DocuSign, invite the engineer to your PLM system, and begin collaborating.