Founding Engineer Recruitment for AI Startups in NYC

Your first engineer might need to turn a prototype into something customers can use. A later founding hire might join a technical founder who needs another person to own a substantial part of the product. Those searches require different people, even when the job titles match.

So we start with the gap in your team. Who makes the technical decisions today? What can your founders already build? Where does progress depend on bringing someone else in? The answers tell us which mandate to recruit for.

We build every brief around decisions and outcomes, not a list of frameworks. It gives candidates a clearer picture of the opportunity and gives your team a consistent way to assess them.

Most founding engineers worth hiring are already building somewhere else, and they aren’t applying to jobs. Getting their attention takes a credible explanation of the opportunity: the problem, the team, the ownership and why your company is worth joining now.

An impressive employer or a founding title gives us a starting point for a conversation. The stronger evidence is what the candidate personally built, which decisions they made and how they responded when the original approach stopped working. That’s how we tell someone who contributed to an impressive system from someone who owned the hard parts of it.

A founding engineer weighs the whole opportunity. Salary matters, alongside the equity, the product, the founders, the company’s position and the authority that comes with the role.

A founding engineer search needs a shared understanding of the role and a hiring team prepared to make decisions. Here’s what we handle at each stage and what we need from you.

Two founding searches we’ve run for New York AI startups.

The right model depends on whether you’re making one critical hire or building an entire team. We agree the engagement and fees upfront, with no hidden costs or surprise fees.