Helping seed–Series B startups hire engineers who actually ship in real AI workflows. Based in Austin — building the modern hiring playbook.
def hire(candidate):
if candidate.ships_with_ai:
return "offer"
return "pass"For the last decade I've sat at the intersection of talent acquisition and engineering culture, helping startups go from "we need to hire fast" to "we hired the right people, and they're still here in 18 months."
I lead Talent at ScaleForge Tech, where I rebuilt the engineering funnel around real work — open-laptop, AI-tools-allowed assessments that mirror how engineers actually build today. We cut time-to-hire by 42% and pushed 12-month retention to 94% across 140+ technical hires.
Before that I was a top-1% billing recruiter at Robert Half, and I cut my teeth running campus pipelines at UT Austin and Purdue. That campus work is where I first noticed that the best new grads weren't the ones who memorized LeetCode — they were the ones who already lived in Copilot, Claude, and Cursor.
That insight became AI-Work Interview Room, a transparent AI coding interview tool I built with two engineering friends for early-stage startups. It replaces gotcha whiteboards with a real repo, a real ticket, and a real AI assistant — and gives hiring teams an honest signal about how a candidate thinks with AI.
"Stop testing for the engineer you wanted in 2018. Hire the one your company needs in 2026."
If you're a Seed → Series B founder thinking about your next 5–25 engineering hires, I'd love to talk.
A practical argument for replacing puzzle screens with a repo slice, an issue brief, and permission to use AI while the interviewer watches the tradeoffs.
What changed when early-career candidates got a prep packet, a smaller repo, and a scorecard calibrated for learning velocity instead of senior-level polish.
A 90-second tour outline for hiring teams: ticket brief, repo context, assistant transcript, and the scorecard review that happens after the session.
A transparent AI coding interview environment built for startups. Real repo. Real ticket. AI tools open by default. Honest signal on how candidates actually think with AI.
"Diego rebuilt our entire engineering funnel in a quarter. The AI-Work assessment alone saved our staff engineers ~6 hours a week of interview load and the candidates we hired ramped twice as fast as our 2023 cohort."
"We tried three recruiting firms before Diego. He's the only one who actually understood what shipping with AI looks like day-to-day. Closed two staff hires in 19 days — both still here and crushing it."
Booking Seed–Series B engagements for Q3. Tell me a little about your team and I'll get back within 24 hours.