Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, April 26

Happy, happy Friday. For those new - welcome to Coastal Recruiting’s weekly roundup where we highlight the top 1% of engineering talent actively interviewing for VC-backed startups. From founding engineers to AI/ML engineers working LLMs to wicked smart smart contract developers, Coastal works across the spectrum of agile candidates looking for expanded ownership and impact in their next role.

In San Francisco? 

The Coastal Team will be in SF the week of May 6th to meet founders, investors and strategic partners. DM us directly on this email if you’ll be in town and open to meeting IRL… we may or may not have some sweet merch we’re itching to give away…. 

We love bragging about our clients and wanted to give a huge shout-out to the Rabbit team for executing a massively successful product launch this week in NYC. Big props to the team… keep an eye out next week for another enormous announcement from a Coastal partner.

Below are some of the top profiles we’re working with at Coastal - if you know of any founder / hiring manager building their engineering/product team, feel free to pass along this email. 

Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• Currently a Sr SWE at Stripe, working on small team essentially a startup within a startup (can operate w/o red tape - just a team of 3 engineers) building ML-based platforms.

• From Python, React, Java/Scala - he’s worked across the stack. Passionate about working on cutting edge ML research and technologies

• Published a number of ML-related papers at Brown and is targeting a small, fast moving startup in the AI/ML space

Founding Full Stack Engineer (Certified Beast)

• At X1/Robinhood, he wrote all of their initial fraud big data pipelines, vendor API management, data warehouse, ETL pipeline, and formatting it for consumption. Owned a project around users and verification teams for maximized conversion and some ML as well.

• X1 was acquired into Robinhood shortly after he joined – he has the itch to go ‘0-1’ again. He’s been doing a ton of integration work and doing a lot on the modeling, architecture, and scaling side as well.

• Carnegie Mellon degree and backend focused fullstack engineer. He’s been in fintech for a long time and looking to pivot to a different domain

Founding Engineer

• 2x Founding Engineer -  most recently at Savvy Wealth where he joined as the first overall hire outside of the 2 founders, now building it to $400M+ and a large engineering org / company. He has the itch to go '0-1' again and is looking to join a promising seed / Series A team innovating in AI.

• He’s looking to join a small, engineering-centric AI/ML company where there’s a strong culture around engineering and a path to commercialization

Early / Founding Engineer (Web3)

• Incredible culture fit and background. Currently at Caldera building out their core infrastructure, protocol, and backend. He is a founding engineer there and was employee # 2. Previous to that he worked at Jump Trading and built the trading systems on the exchange.

• Given his past in crypto and high-frequency trading, he’s looking to join a blockchain startup in the DeFi space and/or focused on trading.  He has founder level experience and would love to have another founding role with a ton of impact. He is a great culture fit and would be an amazing all around engineer.  

Early / Founding Engineer (Web3)

• Rare to interact with a candidate that strikes the perfect balance of early-stage culture fit, proven track record of owning complex projects to completion, and hustle.

• Currently a founding engineer at a high frequency trading startup in the crypto space where he's led the development of their core trading system from zero to trading across 5 exchanges in cefi and defi. Before that was the founding hire and tech lead for a brand new automated trading team at Ripple where he worked heavily in Python - building most of their data pipelines for ML features.

• Currently looking to join an early-stage blockchain trading startup in California or New York.

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