StackedSP is the search partner for venture-backed companies building with AI. Forward-deployed engineers, AI engineers, software engineers and the leaders who run them. The whole market mapped by our own system, every shortlist judged by people who have placed engineers for more than a decade. Our system finds them. Our people win them over.
We take on partners, not clients, and we stay through the rounds that follow. Seed to Series D to category-defining company, with the funds that back them. Increasingly that includes the established companies our startup partners sell to, now hiring the way startups do.
One of the rarest profiles in AI right now: engineers who can sit with a customer, tell which request is the product and which is a distraction, and ship the integration the same week. We keep a specific map of who has done this and who only says they have.
Applied AI, research engineering, machine learning platform and inference infra. People who have shipped models to production and can write the eval that proves it. We screen for taste, which is harder to find than skill and shows up in what someone chose not to build.
Founding engineer through staff. Full-stack, backend, infrastructure, product-minded builders who want to own the whole problem and ship weekly.
CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, Head of AI. Executive search run by people who can tell the difference between a leader who scaled a team and one who was present while it scaled.
When the team around the engineers needs to keep up, we place those roles too.
The hire every AI company wants right now is an engineer with taste. Someone who can say what good looks like before the code exists, and write the eval that proves it.
Hiring works the same way. Our system generates the candidates. Our people decide which ones are good. Every shortlist is an eval we are willing to be judged on.
Venture-backed companies born on this stack, seed to Series D. Our sweet spot.
Established companies that have decided to make the shift and need a Head of AI, a Head of Data, and engineers who have shipped this before. Real mandate, real budget, a blank page.
Different cultures, different starting points. The bar for who gets hired is the same.
The learnings from every search we have run, the public record of who is building what, and your search requirements, in one system. Agents do the reading and the ranking. Recruiters do the judging and the closing. More than a decade of outcomes are already in it, so your first search starts with everything we have learned.
Profiles, code, papers, talks and launches from the public web. More than a decade of our own searches, interviews and outcomes. And the bar, the stage and the comp you set with us.
Every candidate, conversation and outcome in one place, enriched from public and private sources and broken into the attributes that predict success in the role. Nothing important lives in someone's inbox.
Our Champion methodology scores every engineer on four pillars refined over more than a decade, and looks for taste: what they shipped, how they measured it, what they chose not to build. The matching engine ranks the whole market against your bar and shows its reasoning.
A recruiter who knows the market makes the call, runs the interviews and closes. Every outcome goes back into the graph, and your search runs on everything it has already learned.
Finding champion talent is a science. Persuading them to make a change is our art.
More than a decade of relationships with engineers and leaders at frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI and at the startups moving fastest. Built one conversation at a time, long before there was a role to fill.
A scorecard tells you who is strong. A person who has run hundreds of these searches tells you who will actually say yes, what it will take, and when to walk away.
Offers, counters, the partner's cold feet and the candidate's. We stay in the room until the signature, and after.
The system is already trained on more than a decade of searches. Yours starts at full speed on day one.
Four stages. The system does the science: mapping the market and scoring every candidate. Our people do the art: calibrating the brief, persuading the best to listen, and closing.
A working session on the role, the stage, the bar and the market. We tell you whether the role as written is findable, what it pays, and what to change if it isn't.
More than a decade of search dataThe system maps the whole market for the profile: who is building what, where, and who is realistically movable. You see the map, not only the people on it.
talent graph + enrichmentEvery candidate is read and scored before a human spends a minute on them. The humans then do the part that matters: structured interviews against your bar, references, judgment.
champion score + matchingWe run the offer with you, handle the counter and stay close after the start date, so the hire sticks. Most clients come back for the next one.
learning loopThe first shortlist is a hypothesis. Your feedback on it tightens the bar, redraws the map and sharpens the message, and the search iterates week over week until it closes. Calibrate, map and assess run as a loop, not a sequence.
StackedSP has delivered world-class talent across multiple functions and geographies, with outsized impact.
They built our teams in engineering, product, design, marketing and operations, and helped us launch into new markets.
StackedSP consistently delivers engineering talent at a high bar of excellence.
StackedSP was founded by Ilan Saks and Jared Saks and works out of Toronto with venture-backed companies across North America, mostly in San Francisco, New York and Toronto. Ilan started his career at a seed-stage venture fund and still invests in the companies and funds the firm works alongside.
The team is eight people, on purpose. You work with the people who run your search from the first call to the signed offer, and every one of them lives inside the same system you saw above.
We also run Unstacked Startups, a podcast and newsletter for founders and operators scaling venture-backed companies. It is how we stay close to the people we place, and how we give back to the community that hires them.
We exceed expectations by always taking the extra step.
We face the impossible with energy, grit and cleverness.
We own our actions and don't make excuses in the face of great challenges.
We collaborate to achieve the mission. We listen and never stop learning. We don't take credit, we give it.
We strive to affect change through positive thoughts and actions. We present solutions, not problems.
Category-defining companies are built one hire at a time. We would like to build yours with you.
A thirty-minute call: whether the role is findable, what the market pays, and how long it will take.