Good People, April 18th

GOOD PEOPLE QUOTE

🤝 Good Morning and welcome back to Good People, a weekly newsletter for 30,000+ elite engineering and product talent buying designer straight from China.

📅 This week in the newsletter:

🕵️‍♂️ Product Engineers vs Software Engineers: We’re seeing a trend in the hiring market, with startups specifically requesting “Product Engineers”.

 🏢 Foundation Models: In 2025, the AI landscape is indeed evolving rapidly with the competitive edge moving from companies having the best foundational models to businesses excelling at fine-tuning pre-trained models or developing specialized tools to layer on top of them.

 🔥Hot Startups Hiring🔥 

👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇

🕵️‍♂️ New Kid on the Block? The Rise of Product Engineers

A fascinating trend we've observed in our recruiting practice recently: the emergence of "product engineer" as a distinct role from the traditional full-stack engineer. While both roles involve coding skills, there's a crucial difference that's reshaping how startups build teams.

What makes a product engineer different?

In our recent team discussion at Coastal, we noted several key traits that define this emerging role:

• They thrive in zero-to-one environments, building products from scratch

• They work directly with users, collecting and implementing feedback

• They own the entire lifecycle from product ideation through production

• They excel at cross-functional communication

The industry is noticing this shift too—searches for "product engineer" have grown by 80% since 2021, with forward-thinking startups prioritizing engineers who are customer-obsessed and comfortable working autonomously. Posthog

This realization has led us to update our tracking systems to differentiate these roles more clearly. For example, a Y Combinator startup we're currently staffing is specifically seeking product engineers who can help define features, not just implement them.

Why this matters for your career:

If you identify as a product engineer, this is a significant advantage for startup roles. Your willingness to wear multiple hats and directly shape product decisions makes you exceptionally valuable in early-stage environments.

Conversely, if you recognize that you prefer pure engineering challenges without customer-facing responsibilities, that self-awareness helps us match you with roles where you'll thrive.

What we're doing about it:

Starting this month, we're adding "product engineer" as a separate tag in job descriptions. 

The question for engineers: Which camp do you fall into? Are you energized or drained by direct user feedback and product ownership? Neither path is better—but knowing which suits you leads to much more satisfying career moves.

🏢 Foundation Models Break Free

The foundation model landscape has dramatically changed in the past year. If you've been watching the AI space, or A1 as we like to call it, you’ll have noticed these rebellious AI teens are yearning for a life outside their big tech parent’s control. Let’s explore some:

Mistral AI: The European Upstart

Mistral AI, founded by former Google DeepMind and Meta AI researchers, has emerged as a formidable player with their "Mistral Small 3" model. Despite being just 24B parameters (compared to models 3x larger), it delivers performance competitive with much larger models like Llama 3.3 70B. Simonwillison

What's fascinating about Mistral's approach is their strategic decision to create "purpose-built systems for specific contexts and requirements" rather than pursuing a single monolithic model. This diversified portfolio includes specialized tools for different applications while making their base models available under permissive open-source licenses. VentureBeat

The Rise of Specialized Models

The ecosystem now includes highly specialized models focused on specific domains. DeepSeek's reasoning models, Qwen's mathematics-focused variants, and Cohere's enterprise-level solutions each target distinct use cases with architectures optimized for their specific domains. n8n Blog

Ollama's library now features dozens of specialized models including Stable Code 3B (for coding), Qwen2 Math (for mathematics), and Aya 23 (for multilingual applications) - each designed to excel in their specific domain rather than being general-purpose. Ollama

Democratization Through Open Source

Models like Llama 2 have "gained attention for its advanced capabilities" while being "free to use and can be used commercially or fine-tuned on your data to develop specialized versions." This represents a fundamental shift where powerful foundation models become accessible building blocks rather than closed systems. DevDynamics Blog

MIT Technology Review identified small language models as one of the breakthrough technologies of 2025, noting that while "large language models unleashed the power of AI," we're now seeing "more efficient AIs take over" as specialized models optimize for specific tasks. Technologyreview

What This Means For Engineers

For engineers considering career moves, this trend creates fascinating opportunities:

1. Specialization premium: Engineers who deeply understand specific domains (healthcare, finance, legal) can command premium salaries when pairing that knowledge with AI expertise

2. Infrastructure innovation: The explosion of specialized models is driving demand for new deployment, optimization, and monitoring tools

3. Custom fine-tuning: Companies need engineers who can take these foundation models and adapt them to specific business problems

4. Hardware optimization: As models proliferate to edge devices and specialized hardware, expertise in model compression and efficient deployment becomes crucial

The most exciting roles we're seeing emerge combine deep technical AI knowledge with vertical industry expertise - exactly the intersection where the next generation of AI applications will be built.

🔥 Hot Startups Hiring

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