Coastal Recruiting - Weekly Candidate Spotlight, Jan 25

Happy Friday! Welcome to Coastal Recruiting’s weekly candidate spotlight. As always, reminding everyone we work with a healthy mix of experienced Full-Stack, Front-End, Applied AI/ML, Back-End and Smart Contract candidates – all have a blend of big tech + 0-1 experience, looking for their next role.

Before scrolling to the rockstars below (including someone who was included in Walter Isaacson’s Elon book…) - hear from the Founder & CEO of Blockaid about Coastal’s helping hand in placing Glenn Rachlin as their new revenue leader: 

“David and Evan were instrumental in helping us hire a VP of Sales. From kick off to candidate placement/signing, they were over-communicative each step of the way - and are incredibly easy to work with. Most importantly, they quickly delivered high quality candidates for us to review, ultimately helping Blockaid land a stellar executive-level commercial leader. I’d certainly work with the Coastal team again”

Ido Ben-Natan, CEO & Co-Founder @ Blockaid

Fresh off their Series A funding round led by Ribbit and Variant, with participation from Sequoia, Greylock and Cyberstarts, we helped Ido and Raz land Glenn quickly and efficiently – anyone whose been in web3 knows Glenn’s reputation, which speaks to the caliber of team Blockaid is building and their position in web3 security. Excited to see the announcement this week.

Now, without further ado, rockstar candidates from the past week. Give us a shout if you, or anyone you know, is hiring!

Sr Full-Stack & Smart Contract

• Sr Backend Engineer @ Snap where he led the backend development of the push notifications and login/registration system

• Experience building 0-1 projects at Snap and led efforts to launch username recycling which allowed > 1B inactive usernames to become available 

• Looking for early-stage startup where he can work on great projects with great engineers 

• Created a personal web3 project which enabled guilds to manage people, assets and process transactions (with >10K txns / month)

• Based in LA; BS, CS University of Waterloo 

Sr AI/ML Engineer

• ML Tech Lead @ Google, focused on Google Bard

• Lead on query understanding team focused on search classification and querying 

• Developed API/tool generation functionality on flagship Search Generative Experience conversational model 

• Developed teacher distillation solution to service concurrent client developments on production models couples with LoRA-based serving solution for quality isolation and scalable serving 

• MS: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon (4.0 GPA) 

• BS: Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Capetown

Sr Full-Stack & AI/ML Engineer

• Senior SWE currently at Orby AI - employee #5 (Orby is an AI document processing workflow automation startup). A lot of his work has been 0-1 and has owned the end to end process.

• At Orby, he’s worked across the backend, he focuses on ML infrastructure and server infrastructure as well

• Has experience building machine learning models and bringing them into production (experience from Smule)

• At Google, was building the infrastructure, optimizing workflow latencies + also worked on the backend distributed systems side (was an L5)

• Biggest motivations: Looking for an opportunity where he can grow in his role and have more of an impact. It’s also really important for him to like and enjoy working with the team.

Sr ML Engineer

• Currently Sr Staff Engineer @ LinkedIn’s ML team, overseeing a team of 50 

• 4+ Years at ‘X’, serving as a lead ML Engineer - focused on open-sourcing X’s algorithm

• Served as Elon Musks’ right-hand man during the transition

• Looking to get back to the 0-1 environment and have the ability to build with a cutting-edge ML/AI company - ideally in the Bay as he is keen for onsite collaboration

• MS, Data Science from Columbia

• Bad. Ass. 

Sr Full-Stack Engineer

• Currently Sr Staff Engineer @ Discord, coming through via the Sentropy acquisition 

• Was an early engineer at Sentropy where he was the lead engineer on their web application, leading their pivot from ML + infra via an API to a full-service application

• Looking to get back into the 0-1 environment, ideally with a seed-stage environment and be able to have ownership and impact with a brilliant team

• BS, CS Berkley 

Interested in learning more? Reply to this email or grab time HERE to dive in. 

Until next time 🫡

David