Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, April 19

So - I’m generally a fairly humble person - but holy Toledo, the candidates we’re working with from this past week are absolute 🔥. From the 30th employee at eBay to Headspace’s first ML hire and smart contract engineers directly building L1’s - check out the profiles below for brilliant engineers actively interviewing. 

As a reminder, Coastal Recruiting helps VC-backed startups hire the top 1% of engineering talent across the stack. DM us here or reach out via LinkedIn, our website to chat about how we can help you and/or your portcos build. 

Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• Currently an L7 at Google Deepmind - he has previous 0-1 experience, even Co-Founding his own company that raised $5.7m from a16z and other top investors

• He’s a polyglot developer who can pick up and use any tool/tech for the job. Currently he’s the guy who helps facilitate ML/AI at Deepmind - mainly focused on the infrastructure behind model training / tunings

• He started working with LLMs when he was on the original autopilot team at Tesla. Every piece of data Tesla trains through neutral nets comes through the system his team built 

• Looking to join an early stage AI/ML startup

Early Engineering Lead (AI/ML)

• As a Principal Engineer / Tech Lead at Roblox with previous Tech Lead experience at Google, this candidate is looking for an opportunity to join a seed/Series A startup where he can work with the CTO on the roadmap and have outsized impact

• He currently leads many of Roblox’s cross-platform infrastructure initiatives and at Google was a TL at Google Lens - focusing on Android + on-device ML infra

Early Engineer (Web3 / AI)

• As a Founding Engineer (BE focused) at a global blockchain protocol - he joined and helped grow the team to 13 engineers with hundreds of thousands of users 

• Overall has 9 years experience with a focus on architecting and building back-end and cloud solutions at massive scale - previously serving as a Member of the Technical Staff at Salesforce

• Looking to join a startup poised for massive growth / scale and help continue to their backend - either in Web3 or AI

Early Engineer (DeFi)

• Currently a Sr Blockchain Engineer at BlockApps, where he works on building their proprietary Layer 1 blockchain - STRATO. 

• He's worked on features in their own smart contracting language, similar to Solidity, and is complemented by a custom virtual machine (VM), consensus algorithm, and indexer to meet the specialized needs of their platform.

• Personally, he’s obsessed with DeFi and is looking to join a team early on innovating in the DeFi space - hopefully working alongside the founders / technical leadership on their roadmap

Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• As the 1st ML Engineering hire at Headspace - he’s helped the team and org scale to 15 ML engineers. He’s a thought leader in the ML space - having spoken at numerous data science conferences and has published a number of articles and podcasts on the subject. 

• He has 8+ years of industry expertise, currently serving as a domain lead / Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Headspace. 

• He feels like he’s hit his ceiling at Headspace and ready to go 0-1 again, ideally helping an early AI/ML company build its ML function from scratch

Sr Cloud Engineer (AI/ML)

• As the 34th employee at eBay, Director of DevOps at Atlassian and Head of Cloud at HEB - he knows a thing or two about scaling cloud-native environments at larger organizations and fast-growing startups. He’s a savant across all 3 public clouds.

• He’s seen it all; and has the bug to build again - ideally in a fast-moving AI/ML startup where he can help the core cloud teams build out instances from scratch and setup the cloud infrastructure in a way for sustained hyperscale

• Recommend chatting with him just for his stories about early-days eBay

Early Engineer (Web3)

• As a Founding Engineer at Cega Protocol - working extensively across the stack, leaning towards the BE and writing many of their core smart contracts. 

• Going from the 2nd engineer to a current engineering org of 15, he’s looking to be early-stage again - ideally as a web3 startup’s first Smart Contract Engineer

• At Cega - he's led EVM contract development for DCS, working in-depth with Solidity, Hardhat, EVM, Typescript, and Node.

• At Swim Protocol, he spearheaded the company's NFT strategy, starting from no knowledge company wide to airdropping 13,000+ nfts.

• Worked as a BE eng at Opendoor Labs and Nextdoor before diving into Blockchain

Engineering Lead (Web3)

• Currently a Senior Tech Lead at Google, she runs the team that builds and maintains infrastructure to index blockchains and on-chain activity. Previously she oversee the team at Google Cloud that was tasked with Web3 Data Engineering

• She has a deep background in data engineering and infrastructure engineering – looking to join a Series A startup as a tech lead in Web3 

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