Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, July 12

Happy Friday, everyone - 

Popping in your inbox going into the weekend with our engineering roundup. For those new, this is  Coastal Recruiting’s weekly newsletter where we highlight top engineering profiles we’re working with - mainly in San Francisco and New York City. All engineers are actively interviewing, ideally looking for a high-growth Seed or Series A startup where they can have expanded ownership, impact, and ship quickly. 

Before we dig into this week’s stellar profiles, check out what the CEO of Tennr (a16z, Foundation Capital, Y Combinator) had to say about Coastal. Been a blast helping the Tennr crew build their eng team in NYC:

“Coastal just genuinely got exactly what we were looking for, and delivered over and over again during a big period of growth. They’re super easy to work with, and seem to be omni-present. Already have recommended them to a bunch of founder-friends and will continue to!”

Trey Holterman, CEO & Co-Founder

Last - I’ll be in NYC for a few days next week – DM me if you want to meet for coffee or lunch!

As always, feel free to share this email with any founder or hiring manager you know building their engineering teams… And of course reply directly to learn more.

Founding Engineer + Staff/Tech Lead (AI/ML)

• Co Founder for YC backed startup that raised $5.1M. He was Instrumental in their raise. He built the team and tech from the ground up in India/US/Ukraine. Revenue up to $700K ARR.

• Led large engineering teams at high growth companies such as Facebook and Airbnb with a strong track record for solving complex problems and top ratings.

• At Meta, he drove strategy and execution to track and prevent data flow of PII to key ML algorithms

• Lead the team to implement more secure and privacy centric authentication mechanisms at Airbnb such as Phone Verification and Signup with Apple. This led to improvement in GBV by slightly over $100M.

Platform Eng (AI/ML)

• Was hired as the Backend Tech Lead at Adept AI where he took over all infrastructure work, rebuilt their product infra, and generally did a lot of backend work. Also worked with RAG/Inference/ML Infra.

• AI Agent work: Built a platform that allowed them to move agents to the cloud, wrote backend code in Typescript and Python which he considers to be his strongest languages.

Senior Engineer (Crypto)

• Perfect combination for crypto, backend, and infrastructure. First part of his career was in web2 solicing enterprise business decisions with data. Found a passion for open systems for coordination and movement of value across the internet. Found a passion for Infrastructure and passion for building back end systems.

• Founding Engineer at Tephra where he has done a lot of product frontend in his current role but still finds backend to be where his interests lie.

• Co-founded Veridata, a modern real-time API and data scraping platform for the background check industry. He built a serverless data scraping platform on AWS using Lambda, SQS, ECS, Puppeteer, Browserless, and Terraform to fetch public record data from court systems, scaling to thousands of requests per second. Built a user-facing webapp using Flask and Postgres - leading team of 4 engineers

Senior / Founding Engineer (Crypto)

• Founding Engineer @ Mysten Labs. Web3/Blockchain Infra (Sui), Programming Languages (Move) & Execution Engine, GraphQL, AI/LLMs, Incident Response, Dev Tooling.

• Rust, Python, Move. Prior when he was @ Netflix he focused on Distributed Systems & Stream Processing.

• Left recently to take a break - launching a blockchain is a lot of work :)  1st engineer there @ Mysten Labs. He has experience with blockchain infrastructure - and touched everything except for frontend. (Execution, consensus, GraphQL, AI, debugging, tooling.)

Founding / Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• Joined YC, launched his most recent startup where they have been pivoting a few times since his cofounder were first time founders. Have made some mistakes and did not grow as fast as they hoped. They are now approaching the end of their runway, couldn't raise additional funding, and the revenue wasn't sustainable.

• Simple Cost Control & Monitoring for Large Language Models. Pivoted to BricksLLM an API gateway for LLMs that has been deployed and is open source and he helped build the frontend and backend

• Product has been deployed to BMW, Paying customers including $4B fintech unicorn

Senior / Early Engineer (Data / Infrastructure)

• Masters in CS from Princeton Joined Two Sigma and in 4 years he spent most of his time building data pipelines, tools, and systems.

• Wanted to be at a smaller company so he joined Theorem to build a credit checks platform from 0-1. He was the 29th employee, engineering team of 8, and data team of 2.

• He took over responsibility and leadership for designing the platforms. The company grew from 30-70 and the Eng team grew to 19 engineers.

Founding / Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• She has been a co-founder for the last 3.5 years. Her companies were bootstrapped. Her partner was an ML Engineer and she drove all things engineering+product+customer facing. Their product was an extension that helped software engineers to analyze Python code for bugs and errors. 

• As a first time founder she took the  company from 0 to 10K ARR and led it through a major product pivot.

• Prior she was @ Microsoft working on AI and Distributed Systems. Part of the Azure Dedicated HSM founding team. True fullstack

Give me a shout if any of the profiles catch your eye! 

Have a great weekend.

David