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
The screen · DevOps engineer
Conntal Vetting Standard
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.
Vetted by
Messaging practice lead · AceMQ
Real excerpts from our screens — switch roles above. See what a senior answer contains.
Screened by practitioners
Ace8 and AceMQ engineers, not recruiters
130+
AceMQ enterprise clients across 26+ countries
Contract, C2H or direct
onshore, nearshore or offshore
AceMQ's figures (130+ enterprise clients, 26+ countries), not Conntal's own. Source: acemq.com.
IBM MQRoles 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 practice that wrote the rubric.
Engineers who run the clusters, pipelines and cloud estates.
Site reliability engineersSLOs and error budgets · on-call design · capacity planning
Kubernetes engineersEKS · AKS · GKEScreened by AceMQ, who run these brokers for regulated enterprises.
Kafka engineersApache Kafka · Confluent Platform · Confluent Cloud
RabbitMQ engineersquorum queues · classic queues · RabbitMQ StreamsIBM MQ engineersqueue managers · channels · CHLAUTHMiddleware engineersqueue managers · channels · CHLAUTHLakehouse, warehouse and pipeline engineers for production data.
Databricks engineersDelta Lake · Unity Catalog · Workflows
Snowflake developersvirtual warehouses · multi-cluster warehouses · resource monitors
Airflow engineersDAG design · scheduler · pools
NiFi engineersflow design · processors · controller servicesOperators for the stores that cannot lose a write.
Redis engineersRedis Open Source · Redis Enterprise · ValkeyIntegration platform and API gateway engineers.
ServiceNow ITOM and enterprise architecture, scoped honestly.
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.
How the vetting standard worksNo 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 vetSenior Kafka engineer
Clear platform, clear seniority.
Also owns ServiceNow CMDB and Snowflake
Three jobs in one title. Split it, or expect a mid on all three.
5+ years of Kafka
Years do not screen. Ask how they reassign partitions under load.
Illustrative example of practitioner notes on a brief.
The scenario and the rubric are on the role page before you engage us.
Any /hire pageRecruiters 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.
Indicative rates, engagement models 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.
ace8.ioMessaging and streaming infrastructure — RabbitMQ, Kafka, Pulsar, IBM MQ, Solace — for regulated enterprises in 26+ countries.
acemq.comCloudera, WSO2, ServiceNow ITOM, knowledge graphs and agentic AI for financial services and healthcare.
duczereast.comResources
Walkthroughs of the screens we run, guides to the commercial side of niche staffing, and research with the method published.
FAQ
Something not covered here? Send the requirement and a practitioner answers it, not a sales queue.
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. AceMQ alone serves 130+ enterprise clients across 26+ countries; those are AceMQ's figures, not Conntal's. 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.
