Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, April 12

Happy Friday everyone, we made it to another drop of Coastal Recruiting’s weekly candidate recap where we highlight engineers we’re working with across the stack. Our sole focus is helping build engineering teams for VC-backed teams, focusing on AI/ML, blockchain, fintech and enterprise/consumer SaaS. 

For all you hiring managers out there, reminder you should never assume you’re the sole startup an engineer is interviewing with. No matter how strong of a team / company / cap table, time and time again we see the best engineering talent get swept up by companies who simply move quicker during their interview process. Best practices:

• From start to finish, the interview process should be 4 steps. Max. 

• Be decisive (get to a fast yes or no) and limit the time between each step in the process (intro screen, technical, onsite, etc), verbal offer, offer letter

• Ideally the end-to-end interview process should be done in a 2-3 week span

Without further ado, peep the profiles below! Pass this along to anyone you know hiring.

Early, Founding Engineer (AI/ML)

• Spent several years at Duolingo, leading team that interacted with OpenAI - having access to GPT4 6 months before public release - overseeing Duolingo’s AI product 

• Most recently, he launched a LLM startup where we wrote 100% of the code

• Looking to join an early-stage Seed/Series A AI/ML company where he can have material impact on scaling the product 

Sr Cloud / Infrastructure Engineer  (AI/ML)

• She is a previous Founder/CTO with 10+ years leading and scaling cloud / infra teams 

• She was the 1st SRE at Airbnb, leading a team and overseeing a massive cloud migration and learning broader infrastructure strategy 

• Prior to Airbnb, she was a lead SWE on Salesforce’s multi-factor auth team

• After founding a VC-backed startup where she led the tech org and built their architecture, she’s looking to join a Series A startup in AI where she can scale an infra team

Sr AI/ML Engineer

• Currently an L5 at Google, this candidate is on Google’s Vertex AI team as a core contributors to Gemini - mainly focusing on growth efforts

• Prior to leading Gemini efforts, he’s worked across the stack at Google - starting in networking / embedded + distributed systems and then was a Team Lead for Search

• With aspirations to start his own company one day, he wants to join an early-stage Seed / Series A company innovating in AI/ML

Senior Security Leader (Web3, SaaS)

• With close to two decades leading networking and cloud security teams at companies like VMware, Brocade and Juul Labs - this candidate has seen massive scale

• Currently as a Senior Security Engineering lead at Chainalysis, he oversees cloud, blockchain and product security 

• In his next move, he’s looking to join an earlier-stage blockchain / digital assets startup to build a security function from the ground up - team, process, tooling across the enterprise, product and infrastructure

Senior Product Manager / Leader (Web3)

• We’ve worked with several high-profile senior product leaders and this candidate is one of the most impressive, by far. He’s a terrific communication, as an MBA from Columbia, has priority consulting experience at McKinsey and let Product at web3 startups

• Currently VP of Growth at a web3 VC-backed startup where he owns strategy. Previously a Director of PM at Scopely, Sr. Product Manager and Portfolio Lead at McKinsey, Director of Product at Thoropass, and Head of Product at Endless AI (Web3 company focused on interactive entertainment).

• His current company is running out of funding and is actively looking to join a web3 company as a product lead

Senior Engineer / Tech Lead (AI/ML)

• This candidate has been in and around the SF startup scene for many years, joining Nightfall AI in 2019 when the company was 15 people and is now a Senior Engineering lead. Currently is a player coach to junior team members and helps the CTO on strategic infrastructure, architecture and product initiatives

• Prior to Nightfall AI, he spent several years at Rally Health as a Senior SWE – ultimately becoming a tech lead 

• He's looking for his next challenge - ideally working at an early stage startup in AI where he can work alongside the founders / CTO on the product, roadmap and ultimately mentor / oversee a team

As always, if you know anyone who is looking to build their team with rock-star engineers - feel free to forward them this newsletter or give us a shout if any of these profiles catch your eye! 

Have a great weekend.

David