Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, May 3

Welcome to Coastal Recruiting’s weekly roundup of the top engineers we’re working with – from AI/ML to web3 and Cloud, these top-caliber candidates are uniquely impressive in their own right and are all searching for their next startup opportunity (ideally Seed or Series A).

Before we dig into this week’s profiles, we want to shout out the team at beehiiv for announcing their $33M Series B lead by NEA. Coastal has been helping beehiiv build their engineering team and having a blast doing so… we also use their newsletter platform for our weekly roundup and can’t recommend it enough if you’re looking to start a newsletter, marketing email, etc

Last but not least – we’ll be in SF next week meeting with founders and investors. DM me if you want to meet IRL!  

Below are some of the top profiles we’re working with at Coastal - if you know of any founder / hiring manager building their engineering/product team, feel free to pass along this email and have them drop time on here. 

Full Stack Engineer (Web3)

• Currently senior SWE @ Dapper, working on their NFT protocol and NFT catalog. 

• He’s a full stack engineer with strong smart contract experience - he can work across the stack and can lead architectural decisions and building at scale.  Works in Javascript, Typescript, Node, Golang, and some Java/Ruby.

• Before Dapper, he previously founded his own crypto company and worked at Amazon. He’s looking to join an early-stage web3 startup - ideally with a consumer focus - as a founding team member / early engineer 

AI/ML Engineer 

• Founding engineer @ Slingshot AI (very high bar) and helped grow their team. At Slingshot AI he built Slingshot’s ML pipelines from scratch, designed their whole platform 0-1, and worked on the fullstack product side as well.  He can wear a ton of hats and is really strong technically.

• Looking to join a Series A+ startup where he can build an ML function (pipelines, infra) from scratch and be challenged by a new domain and - most importantly - a stellar team around him

Founding Engineer / Tech Lead

• This candidate checks many different boxes, and has a great personality and would be a terrific culture fit. He has led organizations and started a company that was in the Healthcare space - and understands many of the challenges of that industry. He's a Staff level Engineer that works across the stack, with an expertise on the Frontend. 

• He's a former founder and CTO that has deep experience utilizing machine learning and AI in the healthcare space. At his pre-seed startup, he owned execution of technical roadmap, developing a user facing enterprise product from the ground up in React, Typescript, Node.js., and AWS. Eventually over seeing a 6 person eng team.

• MS in Computer Science and EE from MIT, Master in Architecture from Harvard, BA from Washing University in St. Louis

Staff SRE (Founding / Early Engineer)

• Currently Lead Staff SRE at a Series C VC Backed ($110m) startup. He leads a team of 12 while being 100% hands on. He works heavily with application teams on observability and alerting projects in DataDog and Prometheus/AlertManager. 

• He was also previously a co-founder and a part of a company that was acquired by a larger competitor in the dual-sided marketplace space, he then operated on a smaller team and helped them scale and integrate into the platform. Post acquisition, he was promoted to SRE Architect - He led the build-out of a brand new platform as part of a small team with an MVP in 3 months.

Early Engineer (Web3)

• As a Founding Engineer at a top Protocol - working extensively across the stack, leaning towards the BE and writing many of their core smart contracts. 

• Going from the 2nd engineer to a current engineering org of 15, he’s looking to be early-stage again - ideally as a web3 startup’s first Smart Contract Engineer

• He leads EVM contract development for DCS, working in-depth with Solidity, Hardhat, EVM, Typescript, and Node.

• At Swim Protocol, he spearheaded the company's NFT strategy, starting from no knowledge company wide to airdropping 13,000+ nfts.

• Worked as a BE eng at Opendoor Labs and Nextdoor before diving into Blockchain

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