Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, May 17

For those new, welcome to Coastal Recruiting’s weekly roundup of the top engineers we’re working with – as a reminder, Coastal starts working with companies at the Seed/Series A stage – helping them build their engineering teams. From Founding Engineer to Staff/Principal Engineers, we help Founders + CTO’s hire across the stack.

We’ve been on a roll working with rock-star candidates - with no signs of letting down. This week we have some all-stars actively looking for roles (SF, NYC and fully remote). The hiring market is continuously picking up, getting competitive, and the best startups have a fine-tuned, dialed hiring process. With the caliber of engineer we work with, we always advise our founders to move fast as each of these engineers will have multiple offers. 

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

Founding Engineer (AI/ML)

• 3rd engineer @ Rippling, 7th engineer @ Postmates, and founded his own YC-backed startup - what more do you need to see?

• At Rippling, he build their first 120 integrations in their App marketplace and at Postmates he worked on their backend, android apps, delivery optimization and driver incentives

• He’s been hacking on AI/ML projects and is looking for a late-seed / Series A startup in AI to join as a core members of the team where he’d be able to work closely with the founders 

Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• As the 2nd engineer at SnorkelAI’s team, this candidate has seen 0-1 scale in AI. At Snorkel, he built their entire FE team to 9 engineers

• For the last 3 years he’s been running his own AI MVP consulting firm, helping companies like Together AI and Pika build MVPs of their product, helping them go 0-1, and with early fundraising efforts

• He’s tired of the consulting life and looking to join an early-stage Gen AI startup full time where he can have maximum impact

Early Engineer (SRE / Infra) 

• As a Sr SRE / Full Stack SWE @ Google, he led building a platform generating near real-time metrics from Google search logs and producing anomaly detection alerts by using ML prediction model.

• At Google, he designed and implemented new black-box metrics to monitor search results and built faster end-to-end A/B experimentation monitoring system - reducing outage time by 90%

• He’s looking for a high-growth AI/ML startup to join as an early Infra / SRE member

Early ML Engineering Lead

• Currently as a Sr SWE @ Google DeepMind on their Augmented Perception program - leading research on self supervised learning including multimodal supervised learning using RLHF. He’s been working with LLMs since the start.

• Prior to Google DeepMind, he was the Founding Engineer at Cresta AI and also founded his own AI startup 

• Solid CS background (advanced exp w/Python, C++ and Matlab) and 10+ years of experience in AI, Computer Vision, NLP and related fields

Early Engineer (AI)

• A previous YC early engineer who has been working on the cutting edge of AI for the last 7 years. His YC company was working on the bleeding edge of deep learning in 2018; later he was one of the early engineers on the AI Research team at Facebook

• Then he became a Senior ML Eng at Groq, where his name was on a few papers they published on running large scale AI inference. Most recently, he's served on the Data Platform & Recommendation team for Google Search.

• At Google, he's leveraged ML/AI algos to learn about user's context, interests, and preferences to provide custom recommendations. He works deep with search and discovery at Google and is very interested in AI deep learning.

Founding Engineer (AI/ML)

• Scrappy engineer with previous 0-1 experience; having started his own startups and is currently a Founding Engineer at an a16z-backed web3 startup owning much of their core product (getting 4 key products off the ground) 

• He’s become fascinated with AI, hacking on several of his own side projects - one being a chatbot using conversational AI and another GenAI project underpinned by Large Action Models

• He’s build other startups with friends - in web3 and AI - and wants to join a leading AI startup (ideally at seed) with a killer GenAI application

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