Building a founding San Francisco engineering team to match the quality of a world-class offshore operation

📍 San Francisco  ·  🎯 Founding Engineering Team  ·  ⚡ AI-powered startup  

THE CHALLENGE

Levelpath is a rapidly scaling AI-powered procurement platform building the future of end-to-end purchasing. They engaged us to help build their founding engineering team onsite in San Francisco, a team that needed to mirror the technical calibre of a much larger, high-performing offshore operation working across Ruby on Rails, Node.js, TypeScript and React, while raising the overall quality bar.

The challenge wasn’t just finding engineers with the right technical skills, it was finding people with the seniority and judgment to operate as founding team members in a fast-moving, high-expectation environment.

WHY AMIGOS?

Levelpath chose us because of our established presence in the San Francisco startup ecosystem and our track record of placing engineers at VC-backed companies scaling at pace. Our ability to combine deep market knowledge with AI-assisted candidate sourcing gave them confidence we could deliver at the quality and speed they needed.

OUR APPROACH

We kicked off with structured discovery sessions across multiple team members, building a thorough understanding of the technical requirements, team dynamics, and what good looked like for each role. We agreed a cadence of weekly feedback calls to keep the process transparent and continuously improving.

From there, we combined Amigos-specific AI tooling to generate a strong initial candidate pool with rigorous manual screening against our deep understanding of the brief, ensuring every submission was genuinely relevant, not just technically qualified on paper.

THE RESULT

We rapidly increased the volume of high-quality candidates entering the process, enabling Levelpath to accelerate their hiring significantly. Several successful placements were made, allowing the founding SF team to begin taking shape at pace. The quality of our work also resulted in multiple warm introductions to other San Francisco startups (several of whom we are now actively working with).