Coastal Recruiting - Weekly Engineering Spotlight, Feb 2

Happy Friday! Welcome to Coastal Recruiting’s weekly candidate spotlight. It's been a blast building Coastal Recruiting, turning a side-hustle into a full-fledged firm with incredible clients and VC relationships – over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out some BIG announcements about heavy hitters joining Coastal (yes - I did a bit of recruiting for myself!).

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, hear from the VP of Eng from EvolvAI:

‘The caliber and quality of candidates Coastal submitted to us was some of the highest I’ve seen during my time working with recruitment firms. The Coastal team was great to work with - they quickly honed in on our ideal candidate profile and were with us each step of the way, from first interview to negotiation and close. I’d highly recommend them to any engineering leader looking to grow their team”

Robert Severn, VP of Engineering @ EvolvAI

Without further ado, candidates from the past week. Feel free to share with any portcos or founder-friends you know hiring.

Sr Applied AI/ML Engineer

• Recently finished 4th at a Kaggle competition with +4K competitors 

• Currently works at a NL processing e-commerce search startup (Tonita), where he was an early engineer and first ML engineer hired 

• Previous experience @ Google and a high-frequency trading firm

• BS Applied Math, Sciences; Concentration: Computational Science 

• Based in NYC

Smart Contract / Web3 Engineer 

• Founding Engineer at Prime Protocol, previous experience at Nocturne 

• 3rd engineer @ Prime Protocol, owning and building much of their platform

• Pioneered, architected and developed world’s first natively cross-chain prime brokerage 

• Prior to Prime Protocol, spent 2.5 years at Amazon - owning and designing development of a custom CDK framework for the Amazon Go org

• BS, Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ohio State University

• Based in Seattle 

Sr AI/ML Engineer

• Currently Sr Engineer @ Apple, overseeing App Store ML initiatives focusing on optimizing for increased in-app incentives + rewards 

• Prior to 3 years at Apple, spent 2 years @ Amazon owning distributed systems to enable Search and Discovery for Amazon’s new cloud gaming service, Amazon Luna

• Expertise in design and development of distributed systems and ML; looking to join an early-stage ML startup doing something that’s never been done before and expanded product ownership

• MS, CS Georgia Institute of Technology  

Sr Full-Stack & AI/ML Engineer

• Leads the pValue model for travel-based ads across Google, handling all travel-related Google Search and Maps queries (~1bn/day, ~10K QPS) and predicts probability of purchase and expected value of the purchase 

• Length experience at Google, owning many greenfield AI products across Ads and Maps - with a focus (and hunger) for 0-1 initiatives 

• Keen to join an early-stage AI/ML startup to flex his 0-1 building capacity 

• BS, CS from UCLA

• Based in LA

Sr Product Manager - Web3

• Currently VP of Growth at Revel.xyz (web3 VC backed seed startup); owning strategy 

• Previously Director of PM at Scopely and Zyngya - leading design and strategy at various games at Zynga, Scopely, Weebly and McKinsey - comes with a depth of knowledge of the Web3 community/space

• MBA, Columbia

• Based in NYC

Interested in learning more? Reply to this note to dive in.

Until next time 🫡

David