Technical Recruiter, New York
Engineers in AI is a boutique technical recruiting firm based in Manhattan. Founder Tony Kochhar spent 20 years in engineering before he started running searches, and every placement still passes through his desk.
If you are a hiring manager in New York looking for a technical recruiter, the candidate-recruiter ratio in this city is not on your side. There are more recruiters in NYC than there are senior engineers available to hire in any given quarter. Which means most outbound you see, and most resumes you get in your inbox, come from recruiters who cannot tell you what the job actually requires.
Engineers in AI is a tech recruiter in New York that does the opposite. We read the code. We talk to your engineers the way an engineer would. And we only submit candidates we would be comfortable having a technical conversation with ourselves.
New York engineering hiring sits at the intersection of a few overlapping worlds: finance-adjacent tech, media and consumer internet, ad tech, HR tech, real estate tech, and a growing AI cluster around Flatiron and Chelsea. A senior backend engineer in the city is likely fielding interviews across two or three of those verticals at any given time.
That context matters for recruiting. A candidate comparing an offer from a media company against an offer from a quantitative trading firm needs the story told in a way that makes sense for their career, not for your org chart. A recruiter who does not understand those tradeoffs will lose the candidate at the offer stage every time.
Tony Kochhar runs every senior search personally. There is no junior sourcer doing the first call, no account manager translating notes between you and an associate. You talk to Tony, he talks to candidates, and the submittals you see have already been through an engineer's read.
That structure is intentional. We are a boutique firm by design. We take the searches we can personally deliver on, and we decline the rest. It is why our replacement rate on the 90-day guarantee is the single digits, and why repeat clients make up the majority of our pipeline.
We do not run high-volume sourcing for junior roles, nor do we take contingency searches where the JD is a wishlist rather than a job. If you are hiring one or two senior engineers in NYC and you want the submittals to be tight, we are a good call.
Flat 20% placement fee. No retainer. No exclusivity. 90-day replacement guarantee at no extra cost. Over 1,000 placements across 20 years, including engagements with Agoda, Hearst, Con Edison, and Trilogy. You can run us alongside your internal team, a bigger agency, or another boutique without friction. We only bill when a candidate starts.
If you want to see how the process looks in detail, the how we work page lays out the week-by-week rhythm. On most NYC searches, the first submittal is in your inbox within two weeks, and the short list is locked within four.
Our client list skews toward teams that care about production quality over headcount growth. Recent and ongoing engagements include Agoda, Hearst, Con Edison, and Trilogy, alongside a long tail of NYC-based startups at seed, Series A, and Series B. The common thread is not industry. It is the technical bar. Our clients tend to be the ones who have passed on dozens of resumes from a larger agency because the submittals were not close to the mark, and are now looking for a firm that will read candidates the way an engineer would.
A boutique recruiter like Engineers in AI is the right call when the role is senior, the screening bar is high, and the volume is small. When you need one or two engineers who can own a system, not ten who can execute tickets. When your internal team is swamped and you want a pair of senior hands who will not need hand-holding.
A boutique is the wrong call when you need to fill 15 mid-level engineering seats in a quarter, or when comp is well below market. Bigger agencies with bigger pipelines are better positioned for that. We will tell you honestly on the first call which side of the line your role falls on.
If you are hiring senior engineers in New York and you want a technical recruiter who reads the code, book a hiring call. 45 minutes, no pitch, no obligation, and an honest read on whether we are the right fit for your search.
Founder-led searches. 1,000+ placements. Flat 20% fee. 90-day replacement. No retainer.