Building a frontier AI team at speed — 30+ Member of Technical Staff hires in under 6 months

📍 San Francisco  ·  ⏱ 3–6 months  ·  🎯 AI, Infrastructure & Autonomous Systems  

THE CHALLENGE

Fleet AI is working at the absolute frontier of artificial intelligence building RL environments, realistic simulated data pipelines, and the underlying infrastructure to support some of the most complex AI research happening anywhere in the world. To do that, they needed to scale their Member of Technical Staff team to 30 people, hiring deeply technical, high-agency engineers who could operate at pace, delegate effectively to fleets of coding agents, and genuinely understand both AI research and low-level infrastructure.

This is one of the hardest hiring briefs in the market. The candidate profile is rare, the competition for this talent is fierce, and the wrong hire at this stage of a company’s development carries significant risk.

WHY AMIGOS?

Fleet AI chose us because of our established track record with VC and YC-backed startups in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Our reputation in the SF startup ecosystem means we have access to the calibre of candidate that most firms simply can’t reach (Engineers who are selective about where they apply their skills and who trust referrals from within their network over cold outreach).

OUR APPROACH

We embedded ourselves in Fleet AI’s hiring process from the start, developing a deep understanding of what ‘high agency’ and ‘deeply technical’ actually meant in practice for their team, and building a repeatable process to identify and assess it at volume. Given the pace of hiring required, we built a structured pipeline approach rather than a role-by-role search, allowing us to move fast without sacrificing quality.