The staffing arm of Ace8 and AceMQ.
Most staffing firms screen on keywords, because they cannot screen on substance. Every Conntal candidate is put through a real production scenario by an engineer at Ace8, AceMQ or Duczer East who runs that platform for enterprise clients.
Contract · contract-to-hire · direct placement — onshore, nearshore, offshore
Scenario put to the candidate
A RabbitMQ quorum queue loses its leader during a rolling Kubernetes node upgrade. Publishers keep accepting writes, consumer lag climbs, and the on-call dashboard shows the cluster as healthy. Walk me through the first ten minutes.
Real excerpts from our screens — switch roles above. See what a senior answer contains.
Screened by practitioners
Ace8 and AceMQ engineers, not recruiters
130+
enterprises served across 26+ countries
Contract, C2H or direct
onshore, nearshore or offshore
Figures describe the parent practices Ace8 and AceMQ. Source: acemq.com.
Roles we staff
A role page exists here only where we have practitioners who can vet it. Each one publishes the scenario we put to candidates, the technologies we screen on, and the engineer who wrote the rubric.
| Role | Screened on | Vetted by | |
|---|---|---|---|
| DevOps engineers | KubernetesEKSAKSGKE | AceMQ | View screen |
| Data engineers | Cloudera CDPDatabricksSnowflakeGreenplum | Duczer East | View screen |
| Site reliability engineers | SLOs and error budgetson-call designcapacity planningchaos testing | Ace8 | View screen |
| ServiceNow ITOM developersScoped bench | DiscoveryService MappingEvent ManagementCloud Insights | Duczer East | View screen |
| Enterprise architects | TOGAFcapability modellingtarget state and roadmaparchitecture review boards | Ace8 | View screen |
The problem with niche hiring
A RabbitMQ engineer and a “messaging engineer who has seen RabbitMQ” look identical on paper and cost the same. The difference shows up during a quorum failover at 3am, which is exactly when you find out.
We solved this by not doing the screening ourselves. The engineer who assesses a Cloudera candidate is the one who runs CDP upgrades inside banks. The engineer who assesses a RabbitMQ candidate maintains production estates on it. They are not available to other staffing firms.
No candidate reaches your inbox without a practitioner sign-off from the firm that owns that technology.
Every role page shows the scenario, what a senior answer contains, and what a mid answer misses. You can judge the bar yourself.
Where our bench is thin we write it on the page. Our ServiceNow practice is ITOM; we will not send you approximate ITSM candidates.
What you actually get
Each of these is checkable on this site right now, which is the point — none of it is a claim you have to take on trust.
An engineer who runs this platform tells you what is wrong with the requirement first. Most briefs arrive asking for the wrong seniority, the wrong title, or a stack combination that does not exist in one person.
How we vetRecruiters source. The pass or fail is made by someone who does the job.
The five-stage funnelWhen a placement is wrong we raise it before you have to.
Stage 05, ongoing standardWhere our bench is thin we say so instead of sending approximations.
ServiceNow, scoped to ITOMHow you engage
Most enterprise platform work starts as a migration and becomes ongoing ownership, so contract and contract-to-hire lead. Nearshore is our default recommendation because it holds working-day overlap while aligning cost with budget.
A vetted engineer embedded in your team for a defined term.
Work together first, convert when it is obviously working.
A permanent hire, screened to the same standard.
US-based, on client time zones, cleared where the engagement requires it. The model for regulated work with residency or clearance constraints.
Latin America and Canada, four hours or less of overlap loss, same working day. This is where cost and collaboration balance best for most enterprise teams, and it is the model we recommend first.
Europe, India and South East Asia. Works well for follow-the-sun support and for workstreams with clean handoff boundaries.
Rate bands and procurement detail on the delivery models page.
The firms behind the standard
Conntal is its own company with its own bench and its own commercial terms. What it does not have to build from scratch is the technical judgement: three established consulting practices already run these platforms in production, and their engineers screen every candidate.
Enterprise architecture, DevSecOps, cloud-native, extreme automation, data management and incident response across eight service domains.
Messaging and streaming infrastructure — RabbitMQ, Kafka, Pulsar, IBM MQ, Solace — for regulated enterprises in 26+ countries.
Cloudera, WSO2, ServiceNow ITOM, knowledge graphs and agentic AI for financial services and healthcare.
FAQ
Conntal is a niche technology staffing firm. We place senior engineers in messaging and streaming, data platforms, DevOps and site reliability, ServiceNow ITOM and enterprise architecture. Every candidate is screened by a practitioner at Ace8, AceMQ or Duczer East who runs that technology in production.
A generalist recruiter screens on keywords because they cannot screen on substance. Our candidates are screened by engineers who run the same platforms for enterprise clients, on a real production scenario. Recruiters source; engineers decide.
Deepest bench: RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka and Confluent, IBM MQ, Redis, Kubernetes, Cloudera CDP, WSO2, ServiceNow ITOM, and the DevSecOps and cloud-native stack. We publish where our bench is deep and where it is not rather than claiming everything.
All three. Contract and contract-to-hire lead most engagements because niche platform work usually starts as a migration or upgrade and becomes ongoing ownership. Direct placement is available where the role is a permanent platform owner.
Yes. We staff globally and recommend nearshore first, because it keeps same-working-day overlap while aligning cost with budget. Onshore and offshore are both available where residency, clearance or follow-the-sun coverage decides it.
Ace8 and AceMQ are established consulting practices serving 130+ enterprises across 26+ countries. AceMQ runs messaging and streaming infrastructure; Ace8 covers architecture, DevSecOps, cloud-native and incident response. Conntal is their staffing arm, and their engineers vet our candidates.
Send the requirement — or the job description you are not happy with — and an engineer who runs this technology will tell you what is missing before we source anyone.