Coastal Recruiting: Hot Startups Hiring, Jan 16

Hey there from Coastal Recruiting 👋! For those new, Coastal Recruiting is a boutique firm helping top techcnial talent in NYC and SF land jobs at at T1 Venture-backed startups - working with founders backed by a16z, Lightspeed, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Lux Capital, and more..

The start of 2025 has brought a surge in startup hiring — NYC’s and SF’s top founders are hiring across the stack, from 2+ years exp all the way Staff/Principal Level and beyond. All startups are offering top-percentile compensation packages, have fast interview processes, and are assembling world-class teams.

🚀 Most In-Demand Roles Across the Startup Landscape

• Fullstack Engineers

• Backend Engineers

• Frontend Engineers

• AI/ML Engineers

• Crypto/Web3 Engineers

• Product Designers

How to get started? Schedule an introductory consult call with our team today so we can get a better understanding of what you’re looking for next in your career. Reply directly to this email or grab time below:

Not looking, but have a friend searching for their next early stage venture? Let us know!

Now - without further ado - check out the startups below building teams in New York City, San Francisco, and fully remote.

Hot Startups Hiring in New York City 🗽

Opensource LLM Engineering - Seed (FirstMark, Bessemer)

• Mission/Vision: Building fully open-source tools that help LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products.

• TLDR:

  • Tackling frontier challenges in AI with open-source tools

  • Building end-to-end LLM engineering for large-scale, mission-critical applications

  • Developing managed service for AI automation

  • $7.2M Seed round from FirstMark, Bessemer Venture Partners

  • Ground floor opportunity to shape the future of AI infrastructure

On-chain (Crypto) Prop-Trading - 100% Bootstrapped, Profitable

• Mission/Vision: On-chain proprietary, high-frequency trading business supporting on-chain assets with an AUM of $20M.
  

• TLDR:

  • Team comes from TradFi, digital assets, and high frequency trading

  • Small, agile team over-taking market share from massive incumbents in the space. Solely focused on-chain.

  • Strong BD motions; established partnerships in place with leading web3 ecosystems (e.g. Solana, Mysten Labs, etc). Pacing for $XXM+ in profit by EoY (80% Profit Margins)

Autonomous Cyber Defense - Seed (a16z)

• Mission/Vision: Revolutionizing enterprise cybersecurity through autonomous defense systems powered by advanced AI.

• TLDR:

  • Already deployed at Fortune 100 companies and US military

  • Elite technical team from top tech companies

  • Fresh funding from a16z and notable angels

Hot Startups Hiring in San Francisco 🌉

End-to-End Legal AI Platform - Series A (a16z, Lightspeed, Menlo)

• Mission/Vision: Building an end-to-end AI solution for plaintiff litigation firms, transforming how law firms operate.

• TLDR:

  • End-to-end, vertical AI platform for plaintiff litigation firms, built on top of a case intelligence engine - helping these firms transform their business operations

  • Massive Series A led by T1 investors (a16z, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures)

  • High-velocity commercial momentum: 5x’d ARR → multiple millions in 6 months

Leader in Multimodal AI - Series A (NEA, Nvidia, Databricks, Snowflake)

• Mission/Vision: This startup is a leader in Multimodal AI that understands videos like humans.

• TLDR:

  • Their state-of-the-art video foundation models create rich video embeddings from video to power downstream tasks such as Search, Generate and Classify

  • Partners include PineCone, MongoDB, Milvus, and AWS (to name a few…)

  • World-class engineering team working on foundational AI/ML challenges

Stripe for Stablecoins - Series A (Sequoia, Ribbit Capital)

• Mission/Vision: They are building Stripe for stablecoins. Their APIs allow developers to build applications and businesses on top of stablecoins.

• TLDR:

  • Since launching 18 months ago, they have provided millions with faster and cheaper access to cross-border payments; growing monthly payments volume to $1M/month 1 year ago to $500M/month today.

  • Fastest growing Series A startup in Sequoia’s portfolio.

  • Founding team has previously built financial infrastructure at Coinbase, Stripe, Square, Brex, Upstart, DoorDash, Airbnb, etc.

Remote-First Opportunities 🌎

Blockchain Foundation Layer - Series B (a16z, Jump Crypto)

• Mission/Vision: Creating foundational infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of decentralized protocols.

• TLDR:

  • $300M raised from elite crypto investors

  • World-class founding team of blockchain thought leaders

  • Fully distributed remote-first culture

  • Building core blockchain infrastructure

AI Content Platform - Series A (Tiger Global)

• Mission/Vision: Helping teams create on-brand content in one click through AI automation.

• TLDR:

  • 0 to $10M ARR in under 8 months

  • 100K+ paying customers

  • 30% month-over-month growth

  • Remote-first team of 20

AI Healthcare Automation - Seed (YC)

• Mission/Vision: Building AI-enabled software to optimize nurse staffing and scheduling for health systems.

• TLDR:

  • Product uses predictive scheduling to proactively identify staffing gaps and adjust staffing in real time

  • Explosive commercial growth: $2.5M ARR in 2024; plans to triple in 2025

  • Working with top hospital systems in the US

Candidate Testimonial:

Abby is awesome and was an integral part of my job search. She first helped clarify my own half-baked thoughts about what my next role should be and worked tirelessly to find opportunities that suited those requirements. She got those companies excited about me, to the point where I could clearly distinguish which opportunities she had sourced and which ones I had just by the initial tenor of the conversation - it literally felt like a cheat-code!

Interested? Book a quick 15-minute consultation call with our recruitment experts to learn more about these opportunities.

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