Loading…
Topic
Hiring
44 posts about Hiring. Every summary links to the original.
- 44 posts
- 16 companies
The Good Stuff
Paid picks we use ourselves. Links carry a referral code — a subscription through one earns us a commission at no extra cost to you.
Newest first
Posts
Clearleft's Andy Budd on designing for users - The Intercom Blog
Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft, discusses why design is a critical differentiator for startups, noting that companies like Slack and Dropbox succeeded through superior user experience rather than being first to market. He advises hiring the best designers you can afford early to solve existential business problems, then bringing in a more junior team to evolve and maintain the product. Consumer expectations for digital design have risen greatly, but startup budgets haven’t kept pace because few designers hold budget-making positions, creating a misalignment. Agile development has a place, but companies must balance it with longer-term systems that make design, technology, and products scalable. For voice-activated interfaces, designers will still need to define decision trees and logic, shifting from graphic design to conversational and personality design, as seen with tools like x.ai’s Amy.
How to hire designers - The Intercom Blog
The post argues that design is fundamentally about how something works, not how it looks, and that hiring based on visual portfolios like Dribbble perpetuates a misunderstanding. The author presents a four-layer design framework: intended outcome, component design, detailed interactions, and visual layer. He asserts that these layers are interdependent and that the best designers excel at one or two while being very good at the others. He advises evaluating candidates against the specific layers needed for the role, noting that a popular Dribbble portfolio only proves graphics software skill and trend awareness, not design ability. The goal is to break the cycle of misunderstanding design education and ensure companies hire designers who can solve real problems.
CoSupport's Sarah Hatter on customer support - The Intercom Blog
Sarah Hatter, founder of CoSupport and author of the Customer Support Handbook, discussed the evolution of customer support with Intercom. She noted that customers now prefer self-service over contacting support, so simple FAQ pages and email forms are no longer sufficient. Hatter stressed that support must prove company empathy through personalized language, and tracking feature requests, bug reports, and customer tone positions support as the front line for product improvement. When scaling, instead of simply adding hires to handle rising queries, teams should refine processes to reduce the need for support. In hiring, process can be taught but light-heartedness, self-management, and getting to the root of empathy cannot, and Hatter’s Elevate Summit achieved 60% women and 30% non-white by featuring front-line workers instead of only founders and CEOs.
Beyond the AI noise: How Stack Overflow is rethinking tech hiring
The post explains that hiring has become exponentially harder due to a shift to an employer-led market, new roles in machine learning, and AI-generated resumes that erode trust on both sides. A recent Staff Data Scientist posting received over a thousand applications in 24 hours, many with identical formatting and links to nonexistent profiles. Traditional resumes no longer provide trusted information, and AI tools like ChatGPT produce generic answers that obscure genuine candidates, forcing recruiters to add more stages to hiring processes. Stack Overflow is resurrecting its Developer Story feature to let technologists showcase their work, expertise, and impact with verifiable details, including personal projects and career achievements. Developer Story aims to give recruiters objectively verifiable insight and help candidates stand out from the crowd, fixing a broken part of the hiring process.
Inside Intercom London startup panel - The Intercom Blog
At the first Inside Intercom World Tour stop in London, startup founders Bridget Harris, Will Swannell, and James Blackwell shared insights on building great products. On pricing, James advised setting it at the high end you think you can get away with, while Bridget regretted offering a free product that forced later price increases; Will argued simplicity is key, with the cost answer in two words. For hiring, Bridget uses a process of elimination to avoid bad hires and recommends remote options; Will noted HR’s importance is often underestimated. On funding, Will said crowdfunding builds a community of buyers, while Bridget warned VC funding changes priorities. The panel also stressed measuring customer acquisition through each interaction to profit, treating every interaction as a sales opportunity, and ensuring the product solves a real problem; James added that great products create moments of delight when things just work.
One year later: the power of 1.1.1.1 interns
Cloudflare’s internship program, announced a year ago with a goal of 1,111 interns, has hosted 750 interns across 48 teams in nine offices worldwide, including Austin, San Francisco, and London. Interns shipped Cache Transcoding, compressing assets to a third of their on-disk size with Zstandard; CryptoLabe, an internal AI tool for cryptography mapping; and post-quantum visibility in Logpush. AI tools helped interns learn codebases faster and prototype ideas, but managers and mentors remained essential; Iliana measured BGP ORIGIN rewriting on 70% of paths and publicly advocated for removing ORIGIN from route selection. Several Birthday Week launches included intern-authored work, such as Protected Quick Tunnels and native Rust in Workers. The program continues hiring, with many interns returning full-time, aiming to build a new generation of builders.
Welcoming Allie Sperry, our new Customer Success Engineer
Resend has hired Allie Sperry as a Customer Success Engineer to support its growing customer base, bringing experience from Litmus in technical support and Customer.io as a deliverability consultant. Sperry describes herself as an email nerd who enjoys helping developers and builders navigate the complexities of email at scale, and she discovered Resend while building an email sending app for fun using AI tools. She got into software through her older brother’s influence and early experiments with Myspace layouts, which taught her to break down and rebuild code. Her favorite tool is Obsidian for daily notes, and she uses a refillable notebook to draft ideas before uploading photos to Claude or digital notes. Her advice to ambitious software engineers is to focus on the desire to learn rather than knowing everything, and to avoid comparing one’s journey to others, as unique backgrounds create unique work.
Welcoming Gaby Garcia, our new Recruiter
Resend announced the hiring of Gaby Garcia as a new full-cycle recruiter who combines a people-first approach with strategic sourcing and a passion for creating thoughtful, scalable recruiting processes. Garcia holds a background in Psychology, which she says brings curiosity and empathy to her work, and she continually looks for ways to improve how teams hire. She spent the last five years at Automattic hiring engineers and designers, making her well acquainted with developers and the DevTools space. Garcia expressed excitement about Resend’s focus on culture and growing together, stating she loves helping people find a place where they can do meaningful work and feel like they belong. She aims to help Resend grow while being part of that kind of team herself, bringing her expertise to the company’s hiring process.
Welcoming Fabio Kubo, our new Software Engineer
Resend announces Fabio Kubo as a new software engineer joining its software engineering team. With more than 10 years of experience, Kubo has helped scale products to millions of customers at iFood and Nu, and he will bring that experience to Resend as the platform grows. He says the product, rapid growth, technical challenges, and fully public handbook attracted him, with the company’s values, culture, working style, and transparency resonating particularly strongly. Kubo also discusses customer feedback as a source of motivation, names Notion and multi-cursor editing as favorite tools, and advises ambitious engineers to learn how they learn and understand underlying concepts when navigating new domains, technologies, and tools.
Welcoming Manoel do Amaral, our new Brand Designer
Resend introduces Manoel do Amaral as its new Brand Designer, citing more than a decade of experience in product design, motion, and branding, including work for Google, Airbnb, and Accenture. He describes beginning at 13 with Photoshop and Illustrator, learning through YouTube tutorials, Abduzeedo posts, experimentation, and guidance from a designer friend before landing an agency job at 17. Manoel says Resend’s quality, simplicity, sidebar icon animations, and brand work drew him to the company after he used its email product at Savee for customers, prospects, and a weekly inspiration newsletter. Photography, visual curation, sports, and triathlon inform his interests; he names Granola and Strava as favorite tools and Yosemite as a place to recharge in his free time.
Inside MongoDB Dublin: The Heart of Our International Growth
Established in 2013 in Ballsbridge, MongoDB Dublin functions as the company's international headquarters and a primary regional engineering hub. The location employs over 300 individuals spanning more than 40 nationalities across Product and Technology, Sales, and Technical Services teams. Engineers at the hub take direct ownership of core database systems, tackling theoretical computer science problems in areas like query optimization and implementing capabilities like native vector search for embeddings. Benefits provided to employees include 27 days of annual leave, 20 weeks of paid parental leave, and access to internal employee resource groups such as MDBWomen, Queer Collective, and Config. The facility continues to expand its engineering teams to own critical product components rather than peripheral tasks.
First Block with Jesse Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Decagon
The episode profiles Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, whose AI agents support customer service and reportedly achieve 70–80% deflection rates and 3x improvements in customer satisfaction. In its first 18 months, Decagon prioritized short-term execution and customer deployment, then shifted toward longer-term thinking; the source says this helped it move from stealth to unicorn status in a year. Zhang also describes intentional customer discovery, Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), enterprise trust, and the need to pair technical excellence with commercial thinking. He credits senior generalists from his network with establishing an early team foundation that supported growth from 12 to 200 people in 18 months, while cautioning against applying generic advice instead of judging personal strengths and timing.
MongoDB Announces Leadership Transition
Dev Ittycheria announced his decision to retire as MongoDB President and Chief Executive Officer after eleven years of leading the company. Chirantan Desai will become the new Chief Executive Officer effective November 10, 2025. The transition follows a succession planning process initiated earlier this year when Ittycheria concluded he could not commit to an additional five-year term requested by the Board. Desai previously scaled ServiceNow organically from over $1 billion to more than $10 billion in revenue and served as President of Product and Engineering at Cloudflare. Ittycheria will remain on MongoDB's Board to support Desai through the transition into the company's next phase of growth.
Building our next R&D hub in Berlin
Intercom will open its next R&D hub in Berlin on January 19, 2026, to support investment in its AI customer service platform and Fin, its AI Agent. It has already welcomed its first Berlin hires and plans to hire 100 people over the following year across engineering, AI, data science, product, and design. Berlin was chosen for its technical talent, creative culture, AI-focused startups and research labs, and proximity to the existing R&D hubs in Dublin and London. Fin is described as the primary contributor to this growth, with more than 7,000 businesses having transformed customer service with it and Fin months away from passing $100 million in ARR. The new office at Zimmerstraße 78 will host an R&D recruitment event on February 26, 2026, while an AI builders day is planned for February.
We’re Hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to Shape the Future of Medium
Medium is hiring a Principal Backend Engineer, its most senior individual-contributor level, to lead the evolution of backend systems supporting reading, writing, and discovery for millions of users. The role combines hands-on engineering with organizational leadership: the hire will define backend strategy, set quality and architectural standards, review critical designs and code, mentor engineers, and partner with engineering, design, data, and executive leadership. Its technical focus includes modernizing a large living codebase, improving reliability and scalability, and balancing long-term platform evolution with building, debugging, and refining systems directly. Medium says the position should help teams move faster and ship with confidence while keeping the technology fast, stable, and built for longevity; it is fully remote in the US and seeks engineers experienced with systems used by millions, technical debt, fan-outs, and complex edge cases.
AI Interview Success: An Interviewer's Inside Guide
Canva conducts AI-assisted programming interviews designed to evaluate candidates' engineering fundamentals amplified by artificial intelligence tools. Successful candidates structure their interviews across planning, development, and discussion phases, clarifying architectural assumptions before writing code and critically reviewing AI-generated output. Interviewers evaluate engineering problem-solving, technical depth, code ownership, and the effective collaboration with AI assistants rather than isolated prompting mechanics or rushed feature completion. Ineffective strategies include treating models as hands-off solution generators, rushing unvetted features, and prioritizing demonstrations of advanced prompting over core technical judgment. Preparation involves setting up project structures in advance, exploring requirements aloud, and remaining ready to justify architectural trade-offs and production scalability.
MongoDB is a Glassdoor Best-Led Company of 2025
MongoDB has been named one of Glassdoor's Best-Led Companies of 2025, an honor ranking the top 50 organizations with over 1,000 employees based entirely on employee reviews. This recognition coincides with recent company milestones, including the release of MongoDB 8.2, integration with Voyage AI embedding models and rerankers, and the introduction of the MongoDB Application Modernization Platform. MongoDB now serves nearly 60,000 organizations, encompassing more than 70 percent of the Fortune 500 alongside artificial intelligence startups. Company employees attribute the workplace recognition to leadership transparency, regular quarterly goal alignment, and a supportive hybrid work model that grants staff autonomy over their work locations outside the New York City headquarters.
First Block with Brendan Foody, Co-founder and CEO of Mercor
First Block features Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, discussing the company’s path from selling donuts in eighth grade to building an AI-powered recruiting platform. Mercor reportedly grew from $1 million to $100 million in revenue run rate in 11 months, and Foody connects that growth to automated hiring solutions and the AI talent revolution. He argues that founders should pursue problems they cannot stop thinking about, set a high bar for their first 10 hires, and remain patient while shaping culture. The episode also frames fundraising as an input to better user experiences rather than an objective, encourages founders to return quickly to customers, and covers long-term orientation, personal scaling, and finding the right market.
Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is presented as a customer-facing engineering function for B2B companies that need to integrate software deeply, customize implementations, and deliver outcomes for enterprise customers. Palantir is described as creating the role after its founding in 2003, with engineers deployed at military sites and customer offices; the model later spread to companies including Scale AI, C3.ai, Databricks, and Snowflake. At Ramp, the team grew from two to 16 FDEs after emerging in fall 2023, moving from firefighting toward generalized features, platforms, and AI that support enterprise product-market fit and new verticals. Its operating model spans prospects, implementation, rollout, and long-tail support, while “always be scoping” encourages direct requirement questioning, workarounds, and generalized solutions. The hiring guidance prioritizes drive, ownership, customer empathy, and communication alongside sufficient technical fundamentals, arguing that judgment about quick fixes versus scalable solutions is central to the role.
First Block with Michael Truell, Co-founder and CEO of Cursor
Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Cursor, recounts the company’s path from an initial mechanical-engineering AI project to an AI code editor and developer tool. He describes the pivot, the decision to fork VS Code, and the challenge of building AI-native coding tools while balancing speed with control. Cursor initially prioritized product quality over networking, speaking events, and hiring, then added roughly one person every two to three months while scrutinizing its first hires for belief in the vision and dissatisfaction with the current state. Truell argues that founders should question startup orthodoxy rather than follow universal rules, citing Cursor’s solution-first origin, four-person founding team, and deliberately slow hiring before its reported rapid growth.
Related topics
All topics →Weekly digest
The best engineering reads, once a week.