Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, June 7

Hey Everyone - 

David from Coastal Recruiting dropping in with our weekly roundup of top profiles our team is working with. Coastal Recruiting is a boutique recruitment firm that helps founders build their engineering team - generally starting at the seed-stage and helping them grow to Series C and beyond. 

This week - sharing some exceptionally strong profiles across fintech, crypto, AI/ML (applied eng + research), etc - all looking to go 0-1 again.

Quick callout that we’ll be in NYC the w/o June 17th to meet with founders, investors, and strategic partners. If you - or someone you know - is in NYC and thinking about hiring engineers, we'd love to meet for coffee or lunch. Send me a DM to lock it in.

Any of the below profiles catch your eye?

Feel to pass along this email to any founder / hiring manager building their eng team and have them drop time on here. 

Early, Founding Software Engineer (AI, Fintech)

• Currently at Sigma computing on their production engineering team developing new features to optimize user performance. Before that was at Plaid/Google/VMware developing scalable web applications and data pipelines.

• A lot of his work has been building end to end development of features to optimize performance for users.

• Prior to Sigma he was at Plaid where he led dev of debit card new payment offering. He developed a new service from scratch called tokenization - foundation for future card offerings.

AI/ML Eng Lead

• He was the first ML hire at Tome and was a Founding Engineer at Ghost as well. He was initially hired to add AI capabilities on top of their platform. Prompt engineering, AI Imaging, Longform texts, and built an NLP editor.

• He built an improving layout feature from 0-1, Generating data sets and eval tooling to find automated metrics, How to represent the prompt, and how to get models to respond to better accuracy.

• A lot of his work has been around Open AI models - LLMs - Chat GPT-4, Fine tuning experiments, and Prompt engineering

• MS & PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford; BS, Electrical Engineering and Math from Waterloo

Sr Eng Lead (Crypto, Fintech)

• Currently a Head of Eng / Lead Quant Dev at Keyrock - a massive market-maker (currently trading enormous amounts of volumes) where he leads a team of 25 but also actively codes on a daily basis. 

• He loves trading and crypto, and is looking to join an early-stage crypto trading company as a Sr IC / Tech lead where he can be heads down coding / shipping. 

• Prior to Keyrock, has 7+ years in Quant Dev / Algorithmic Trading Experience (across crypto and traditional finance)

AI/ML Eng Lead

• Brilliant and a great communicator. PhD from Harvard and undergrad in Mathematics from Yale. 

• Ex-founder and CTO of Choosy which raised $13M and was acquired in 2020.

• Research experience @ DeepMind, Harvard and IBM. 

• Currently Founding ML hire @ hedge fund and is building out the team. Manages a team of 4. Has consulted for Robust Intelligence (Series A). In Boston and looking to relocate to NYC or SF.

Early Product Manager (AI, Healthcare)

• Senior Product Manager w/ experience as SWE at Google, CS degree from Cornell

• He's deeply passionate about crafting platform products and tools that empower builders and have been able to nurture this passion over the past 7+ years. 

• His experiences building platform products and tools at both Google and early-stage AI startups have honed his skills in driving product development, crafting and executing effective GTM strategies, and aligning customer expectations.

Sr Tech Lead (Fintech, Crypto)

• Currently a Team Lead at Citadel where he oversees a team of 6 under their Electronic Trading team - specifically working on High Frequency Trading. 

• He started his career at Citadel but left in 2022 to launch his own startup in the web3 space, which he wound up shutting down due to lack of commercial viability. He moved back to Citadel but has the itch to build at a startup again - ideally at the intersection of fintech and emerging tech 

• He is mainly looking for a small company where he can have a ton of ownership, impact and code on a daily basis

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