Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, June 21

Happy Friday! 

Welcome to Coastal Recruiting’s weekly newsletter of top engineers profiles where we highlight anonymized profiles of some of the candidates our team works with on a weekly basis we’re most bullish about. Feel free to send this to any founder or hiring manager you know building an engineering team – always happen to chat with them.

We touched down at LAX late last night from NYC where we met awesome partners like Lhava and Tennr, ate Tompkins square bagels, and worked up a sweat sprinting between meetings. Wouldn’t trade battling the northeast humidity for the value of meeting face to face with customers and partners… being a ‘Coastal’ firm, we’ll be spending a lot more time in NYC (and SF).

Now, lets dig into the rockstars below….

Founding Full Stack Engineer (AI)

• YC Founder, Kleiner Perkins fellow, 2 years at Stripe, Summa Cum Laude from Columbia - on top of that he has a great personality.

• He was the Co-Founder and CEO of a YC-backed AI startup and previously was an engineering lead on Stripe’s new payments health product

• Based in SF, he’s only targeting early-stage AI startups and looking for onsite collaboration (also open to relocating to NYC for the right opportunity)

Staff / Principal Engineer (AI/ML…. 0-1 master)

• This candidate is amazing - he's the first engineer hire at Magic and one of the early engineer hires at Alchemy. He knows startups well and loves joining super early stage. 

• He loves working across engineering, strategy, etc and has spent many years working with startups to find PMF.

• He’s strongest on the backend/infra side and working on challenging problems. Loves the AI space and wants to go into an AI startup in his next role.  Motivations: wants to work with good people, people who communicate well, solve interesting problems, and be apart of the early engineering gritty startup space.  

Staff / Principal (Fintech / Trading)

• 20 years of experience with a combination in consulting in financial services at top banks and working for crypto startups. Has a CS degree from Johns Hopkins and a degree in Economics.

• At Galaxy he led the buildout of connectivity to centralized exchanges, supporting infra to settled trades, and Tooling software. Earlier on in his career it was more back office side development and quickly moved into trading systems. Did over 6 years of consulting at Morgan Stanley, working with quants/traders to build out infrastructure.

• At Galaxy there were 75 employees when he joined (10-15 engineers). When he left there were 80 engineers and helped open London/Hong Kong offices

AI/ML Engineer

• She is an impressive Engineer that has worked deeply in the GenAi and LLM space - she has a terrific personality and is targeting early stage, preferably Seed/Series A startups building in AI.

• Extensive experience building and scaling end-to-end microservices for AI applications, including a recruiting recommendation product scaled 3x with improved relevance and performance.

• Holds 2 patents for improving recommendation relevance using machine learning and leveraging feedback in ML models.

• Held advisory roles guiding startups on leveraging LLMs, product-market fit, technical direction, and implementing recommendation algorithms to drive user engagement.

Early Full Stack Engineer 

• She’s a full stack backend focused engineer - specialized in backend engineering and platform engineering, designing backend systems that supports products, auditing, node general pipelines, and prompting sandbox for CSM to design AI models.

• Spent 2+ years at Benchling, where she developed large-scale platform features supporting enterprise admins and the entire Benchling application, including audits, permissions, and idle timeouts.

• She wants to be at a mission driven company and would love to go into AI.  The main reason she is looking for a new opportunity is because she is working remotely and wants to work onsite in NYC

Sr Backend Engineer (AI/ML)

• Started off her career after graduating from Yale at Apple. She joined the AI/ML org where she did a lot of ML training work (Training NLP models to have more accurate responses and Gen Adversarial Networks). Transitioned into more of an Applied ML product role, prototyping and building out infrastructure for magical interactions with their unreleased hardware project.

• Left Apple to join Otter as their Founding Engineer to lean more into the product oriented role. A lot of that work was building out the initial stack (Modern JS) and helping leaders find product market fit with customers to fix child care issues. They didn’t survive the COVID wave.

• Joined Medallion and built out an API from 0-1 that would check provider state licenses, make sure education data is up to date, insurance is up to date, and documents are uploaded correctly. They onboarded large healthcare groups to use the API.

• She is strongest in Backend, Product, and working with how systems are shaped and how to work with the end users

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