Coastal Recruiting - Engineering Candidate Spotlight, May 31

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.

NYC Callout: Asher and I will be in NYC the w/o June 17th to meet with founders, investors, and strategic partners.

In NYC and want to meet for coffee or dinner? Send me a DM to lock it in 🔒.

Coastal routinely works with engineers who’ve gone 0-1 and - after seeing scale + commercial success - are looking to get back in the builders seat, joining mature Seed and Series A startups. 

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

Early, BE-Leaning Engineer 

• As a BE-leaning engineer, he was the 5th employee (1st engineering hire) @ a large Series A startup (T1 investors) where he build majority of the backend 

• As LLMs became popular in 2023, he created a proof of concept that used OCR and LLMs to extract load information from freight rate confirmations, demoed it at the company all-hands, and got buy-in to spend his time shipping the project to production.

• This saved ~300 hours/month for their operations team, and is now a critical piece of automation across the company

• As an Ex-D1 Varsity wrestler at Stanford, he has the grit / tenacity to go 0-1. Ideally at a Seed/Series A startup in NYC.

Early Engineer (AI/ML)

• She was a L5 BE Engineer at Robinhood, - where she was a founding member in their Dev Infra Org, where she worked daily with Python, which she considers is her strongest language. 

• Prior to Robinhood, she spent time at Apple, working as a core developer on their Apple Ads Platform - re-designing and implementing end-to-end streaming pipelines and refactoring search APIs

• Looking to join an early-stage AI startup, ideally in person in SF

Early Engineer (Trading / Fintech / Crypto)

• Strong 0-1 experience at Kalshi (incredibly high engineering hiring bar) and now at Citadel - looking to go early-stage again, ideally in fintech 

• He joined Kalshi when they were a Seed company, and shortly after working on their trading portal, Kalshi raised a $30m Series A. In addition, at Kalshi he Architected a custom multi-layer WS protocol for real-time trading data transfer.

• For the past year, he's worked at the Citadel, building on their electron trading application

ML Engineer 

• Masters from Stanford and CS from Ecole (France's leading CS Uni)

• He has just under 4 years of ML engineering expertise, having worked his way up to Sr ML at Scale AI as they saw a ton of growth. He developed end-to-end ML pipelines and spearheaded many of their CV + NLP R&D efforts.

• For the past 20 months, he's been at Cohere as a Staff ML eng - working on LLM generation, embedding models, and representation learning.

• He also taught Deep Learning for NLP to graduate students at Stanford and is someone that is constantly learning more and more in the ML space.

Early, Founding Engineer (AI/ML)

• Backend data pipeline, distributed systems engineer with experience from Google, Nuro, and most recently at Verkada.

• Spent 6+ years’ at Google where he worked on the backend orders management system (massive project) and then moved over to Nuro where he worked on distributed systems and microservice development.  Worked a ton on the data platform at Nuro as well and deployments to the cloud.  Most recently at Verkada where he works on the licenses and subscriptions platform.  He works mainly in Python/AWS.

• He’s looking to join a company where he can work with super smart people on interesting projects.

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! 

And DM me to meet in the Big 🍎!

Have a great weekend.

David