Startup Recruiting
Startup hiring is a different sport than enterprise hiring. The urgency is higher, the scope is fuzzier, and the candidate needs to believe in the founder. Engineers in AI is built for it.
A startup hiring its first senior engineer has about six weeks before the cost of the empty seat starts compounding. A Series A startup hiring a founding engineer has a similar window, maybe shorter. An enterprise can run a 90-day search for the same role and be fine. Most technical recruiters operate on the enterprise cadence. Startup founders usually discover this halfway through the engagement.
Engineers in AI is a technical recruiter for startups that operates on the startup cadence. Short cycles, fast submittals, founder-to-founder candidate conversations, and a fee structure that does not punish you for moving fast.
Three things separate startup technical hiring from enterprise technical hiring.
Speed. In a startup, the hiring manager is usually the founder. They cannot spend three weeks waiting for a first submittal while the product backlog compounds. Our first submittal on a startup search is typically inside 10 business days.
Context. Startup roles are rarely as scoped as enterprise roles. The job description is often a wishlist, and the real job evolves in the first quarter. A recruiter who reads a JD literally will miss most of the best candidates. We read between the lines on startup searches because Tony, the founder, has been on the hiring side of a dozen early-stage teams.
Sell. A senior engineer taking a startup role needs to believe in the founder, the market, and the tech. A recruiter who cannot talk fluently about any of the three will lose the candidate at the offer stage. Our first call with a startup client is mostly about capturing that story well enough that we can retell it in a candidate conversation.
We do not run volume searches for startup engineering teams. A 20-person-engineering-team-in-one-quarter hire plan is a scale recruiting problem, not a boutique one. If your next hire is one of three or five strong senior engineers, we are a good call.
Most of the senior engineers worth hiring in a given quarter are not on LinkedIn. They are in Slack groups, Discord servers, and a handful of private engineer lists. The best startup recruiters are not the ones with the biggest database. They are the ones whose network overlaps with the kind of senior engineer your startup actually needs.
Tony has been in the NYC engineering network for two decades. The candidates we source for startup roles are usually one introduction away from someone he has already placed. That is the pool that gets you to a close in 30 to 60 days, not the public inbound pool that every other recruiter is working.
Flat 20% placement fee. No retainer. No exclusivity. No minimum commitment. 90-day replacement guarantee at no extra cost. For an early-stage startup, those terms matter. You do not pay unless a hire actually starts. You can run us alongside your own sourcing or another recruiter. You can pause or cancel whenever priorities shift, which in a startup is roughly every six weeks.
Some startup clients deliberately run us on a single senior search at a time and handle mid-level hiring in-house. Others let us run two or three searches in parallel during a funded ramp. Both patterns work.
Founding engineer is the hardest and highest-stakes role we run for startups. The candidate pool is small. The candidate is almost always taking a meaningful pay cut in exchange for equity, which means the story and the founder matter more than the salary. The wrong hire does not just cost a year of engineering leverage, it also shapes the culture and stack in ways the next hires will inherit.
On a founding engineer search we usually spend an extra hour on the first call with the founders themselves, not just the hiring manager. Who are you, what is the market you actually believe in, what have you tried that did not work, what do you see about this space that others do not? Those answers are what a strong founding engineer is actually evaluating, and they are what we will echo in every candidate conversation.
Startup searches move fast only when the first call is detailed. We will want to understand the product, the founding team's technical background, the comp and equity band, the pool of candidates you have already passed on, and what the hire actually needs to ship in the first 90 days. 45 minutes is usually enough.
If the role is real and the comp is market, we will usually have a first submittal in your inbox within 10 business days. If we do not think we can close the role inside 60 to 90 days, we will say so on the first call and refer you elsewhere.
Over 1,000 technical placements across 20 years, with a meaningful slice at pre-IPO startups and a long tail of NY-based seed and Series A teams. Enterprise engagements with Agoda, Hearst, Con Edison, and Trilogy sit alongside dozens of founding engineer and early senior placements for less-recognizable logos. The common thread is senior, technical, and closed within the window the founder needed.
If you are a startup founder or hiring manager looking for a technical recruiter who can actually move at your speed, book a hiring call. 45 minutes, no pitch, no obligation, and an honest read on whether we are the right fit for your next hire.
Founding engineer and senior early hires. Flat 20% fee. 90-day replacement. No retainer.