Why Toba Partners Exists

My role at a conversational AI company in Indonesia came to an end. I am not going to dress that up. It is the honest starting point of this company.

After it happened, I did what most people in tech do. I looked around. And what I saw was a job market that had quietly dried up. Not just for me. For everyone. Good engineers, people I respected, people I had worked with, all hitting the same wall. Fewer openings. Longer hiring cycles. Companies that used to hire freely had gone cautious, and the ones still hiring had more candidates than they knew what to do with.

The engineers were still good. The work was still there. The gap was between the people who could do the work and the companies that needed them.

The problem

Indonesia has a lot of engineering talent. The world does not have enough of it. But the bridge between the two is broken, and not because the talent does not exist. Most companies outside Indonesia do not have the infrastructure to hire, employ, and support engineers here. Setting up a legal entity, figuring out local payroll, navigating compliance, vetting technical ability across language and timezone — most companies will not do that for one or two hires. So they hire from markets they already know, even when better options exist somewhere else.

On the engineer side, the picture is similar. Good engineers in Indonesia want to work on real problems. They want fair pay, stability, and a company that stands behind them. The domestic market cannot always provide that, especially when hiring slows down and the same engineers end up competing for fewer roles.

Toba Partners exists to close that gap. We start with Europe and Australia, where the timezone overlap works, the shortage is real, and nobody yet owns the bridge between Indonesian engineers and teams in those markets. But the problem is not limited to two continents, and neither are we.

What we do

We are a talent partner. That is different from a staffing agency.

A staffing agency introduces you to someone and walks away. We stay. We recruit, vet, employ locally — contracts, payroll, tax, compliance, all handled — and we support the engineers through their time with you. If someone does not work out, we replace them. You get one contract, one invoice, and a team that does the work.

We do not send you a stack of CVs. We send three to five engineers, each with a written assessment based on a real problem from your field. Not a puzzle. Not a leetcode question. Something they would actually run into in their first month working with you. We record how they think, how they handle feedback, and where they are strong and where they are not.

If a shortlist cannot tell you why someone is on it, it is just a longlist with a nicer name.

Who this is for

Companies anywhere in the world that need to build or extend their engineering team and are open to doing it with Indonesian talent, managed properly. We are in Jakarta. We work in English. UTC+7.

Our first clients are in Europe — Germany, Netherlands, Nordics — and Australia, where the timezone overlap is even tighter and the engineering shortage is just as real. But we are not building for two regions. We are building for any company that needs good engineers and is willing to look beyond its own borders to find them.

It is also for Indonesian engineers who want to work on real products, for real companies, with real support behind them. Not freelance. Not gig work. Employment, with everything that word should mean.

Why the name

Lake Toba, in Sumatra. The largest volcanic crater lake on Earth. Formed by a super-eruption seventy-four thousand years ago, and from that crater, the world was rebuilt. The metaphor is not subtle, but it is honest. Something was broken, and something new and better came out of it.

Toba Partners is part of DXP Global Inovasi, an Indonesian company that builds and owns its own products.

What I want this to be

I do not want a large agency with a thousand engineers sitting on a bench. I want the company that good engineers in Indonesia trust to represent them well, and that companies around the world trust to deliver people who can do the work. Small. Deliberate. Built on the kind of vetting and support that makes people come back.

If that sounds useful, we should talk.