Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, Aug 16

Happy Friday, everyone - 

For those new, this is Coastal Recruiting’s weekly newsletter where we highlight the top engineers our team represents across NYC and SF. All looking for startup engineering roles where they can move fast and have expanded ownership of the product, speak with customers, and influence team culture. 

Hiring Tip: Having worked with countless founders build their team, we know how competitive this market is. The top 1% of engineers are being courted by multiple companies – Offering a competitive compensation package is the bare minimum needed - time and time again, engineers are choosing their next role based on alignment to the company’s mission/vision and personal belief in the Founder’s ability to 100x the business. 

Which is why the most successful companies / founders are always selling. From the first founder intro call to onsite, the founders who routinely close unicorn engineers are constantly selling the candidate on the opportunity through each step of the process. 

Interested in tips, tricks and best practices from helping place 50+ engineers at VC-backed startups? DM us to chat! 

Now, see below for this week’s candidate spotlight. 

Senior AI Engineer (SF)

• Has been working in AI for over 25 years across various industries, consulting Datarobot, Airbnb, and Github - was early on working LLMs

• Led Early LLM Research used by OpenAI (who routinely cites his work), publishes blog posts on Hacker News and tight courses on LLMs to 2k+ students 

• Looking for early stage team as a key AI/ML Lead

Senior Full Stack Engineer (SF or NYC)

• Currently a Senior SWE at Primer.ai where he has been for the past 3 years. He's worked end-to-end at Primer, including assisting on their RAG for AI driven solutions under the guidance of Jeremy Lewi.

• Developed scalable microservices for deploying and managing machine learning models, handling millions of requests per hour

• Implemented infrastructure automation solutions, reducing deployment time by 40% and improving system scalability by 50%

• Optimized system performance, achieving a 20% reduction in response time and 15% improvement in uptime

Early Engineer (SF)

• She has spent the last decade working primarily at startups, with roles ranging from frontend to backend engineering. Over the last five years, she has focused on backend development but remains proficient in full-stack engineering.

• She is focused on cultures that value people and are committed to building long-lasting products. Great culture fit. 

• Experience at Vercel, Splice, Mixmax and Vimeo

Founding Engineer (SF) 

• He was the 1st hire and Founding Engineer at Ready.net - YC S20 - he joined while they were still at YC. He built their entire FE, BE, Infra, etc as the co-founders were not technical. 

• During this period, he owned all of engineering and grew the team from 1 --> 40 engineers. When he started they had 0 sales and helped to grow the ARR to 19 million+

• He’s aiming to get closer to hands-on development again, extremely interested in AI code generation, as he believes it is one of the most exciting emerging capabilities of LLMs. 

Full Stack / Front End Founding Engineer (NYC)

• He checks many boxes - he's been the Founding Engineer (and sole engineer) at multiple VC backed start-ups. At Trunk Tools - he was hired when they had no MVP - he and another engineer built out and shipped their MVP, specifically for their RAG AI product. Also, has FinTech compliance experience.

• At Trunk Tools - he built and shipped multiple products from 0-1. He completely owned their FE stack.

• At MANTL, he joined when they were seed and was the 1st hire and the Founding Engineer - he re-architected and rebuilt their FE from scratch. MANTL is now Series B and has raised $40m+.

As always, give me a shout if any of the profiles catch your eye or know any founders building their engineering teams in NYC.

Have a great weekend.

David