Building the founding engineering team for a Kleiner Perkins backed AI startup
📍 Barcelona · 🎯 Founding Engineering Team · ⚡ Kleiner Perkins-backed
THE CHALLENGE
As a pre-product company at an early and critical stage, Axiomatic AI needed to build their founding engineering team from scratch. Engineers who could operate at the frontier of AI development, combine deep technical expertise with a founding-team mentality, and help shape the culture and technical direction of the business from day one.
Beyond the hiring itself, they also needed to build the infrastructure around it: a structured, repeatable interview process with aligned stakeholders and documentation that would scale as the company grew.
WHY AMIGOS?
Axiomatic AI engaged us because of our specialist track record placing founding engineers at VC-backed startups and because they needed a partner who could operate at both the strategic and executional level simultaneously. Hiring a founding engineer is not a transactional process; it requires deep understanding of the company, the technical vision, and the kind of person who thrives in zero-to-one environments.
OUR APPROACH
We began with in-depth talent mapping, building a comprehensive picture of the available market for the profiles Axiomatic needed, identifying both active and passive candidates across the European AI engineering community.
In parallel, we worked directly with the founding team to design and document their end-to-end interview process, structuring each stage, defining the assessment criteria, and creating the interview documentation needed to align all stakeholders and ensure consistency as the team scaled. This included interviewer guides, scoring frameworks and role-specific technical assessments.
With the process in place, we ran the search, identifying and engaging the founding engineering candidates who combined the technical depth and founding-team mindset Axiomatic required.
THE RESULT
We successfully placed Axiomatic AI’s founding engineering team and delivered a fully structured hiring process including interview documentation and stakeholder alignment frameworks that the company could use to scale hiring independently as they grew. Axiomatic AI has since continued to develop their platform and expand their investor base, with Kleiner Perkins, Engine Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures and others backing their vision.