Contrario is building the AI-native recruiting marketplace for high-growth startups.
Startups today rely on fragmented recruiters, slow agencies, and outdated ATS tools. Contrario replaces this with a marketplace powered by ML matching, search infrastructure, and automation systems that route recruiters and candidates to the right roles.
We work with 150+ venture-backed startups including Wispr Flow, Bland, Warp, Listen Labs, and Sieve, and a network of 300+ boutique recruiting agencies (many formerly at Stripe, Ramp, and Palantir).
In the past 9 months we’ve:
Reached $500K monthly revenue (~$6M ARR run rate)
Completed 100+ startup hires
Achieved 98% repeat usage from companies that hire
Maintained <5% customer churn
Our marketplace fills roles significantly faster than traditional recruiting:
GTM + Ops: 80%+ fill rate (~45 days)
Remote LATAM engineers: 90%+ fill rate (<30 days)
In-person engineers: ~50% fill rate (~60 days)
We’ve raised $2.5M from Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners, and angels from Hudson River Trading, Stanford, and OpenAI.
We are scaling aggressively:
$1M–$2M monthly revenue target in the coming months
$25M+ ARR run rate by the end of the year
Thousands of recruiters and hundreds of startups on the platform
The team comes from Stanford, YC startups, BCG, NASA, SAIL, Berkeley, and Northwestern.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are hiring an Applied AI Engineer to help build the core infrastructure powering Contrario’s marketplace.
You will work directly with the founders to design and ship ML matching systems, recruiter routing algorithms, search infrastructure, and AI-powered workflows that determine how talent flows across hundreds of startups.
This is a founding engineering role with extremely high ownership.
You will:
Ship production systems used by hundreds of recruiters and startups
Build the core intelligence layer of the marketplace
Define the technical architecture and engineering culture
Work directly with the founders on product and technical decisions
The systems you build will determine who gets hired at some of the fastest-growing startups in the world.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Build ML-driven marketplace systems
Develop ranking and retrieval systems that match recruiters, candidates, and roles using embeddings, structured signals, and marketplace data.
Design search and data infrastructure
Build systems that query and rank candidates, recruiters, and roles across large datasets.
Develop AI-native workflows
Ship automation tools that help recruiters source candidates faster and help companies evaluate talent more efficiently.
Ship full-stack product features
Design and implement features across the entire stack — from database schema and APIs to user-facing interfaces.
Own core marketplace infrastructure
Work on systems that power recruiter routing, candidate evaluation pipelines, and marketplace coordination.
Move extremely fast
Launch features quickly, gather feedback from real users, and iterate rapidly.
REQUIREMENTS
Must-Have
Strong full-stack engineering ability
Experience building production systems using TypeScript and modern web frameworks (Next.js / React).
Comfort working with AI systems
Experience integrating or building systems using:
LLM APIs
embeddings
vector search
retrieval pipelines
Backend and data systems knowledge
Experience designing APIs and working with relational databases.
Product-minded engineer
You care about UX and building systems that users actually love.
High ownership mindset
You can take ambiguous problems and turn them into working systems without heavy direction.
Startup velocity
You ship quickly and are comfortable working in fast-moving environments.
Nice-to-Have
Experience building:
Search or recommendation systems
Marketplace products
AI-native developer workflows
Experience with:
Supabase / Postgres
Vercel deployments
LLM-powered product features
TECH STACK
Frontend
Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind
Backend
TypeScript APIs
Database
Supabase (Postgres)
Infrastructure
Vercel
AI / Data
LLMs, embeddings, retrieval pipelines
About Contrario
Contrario is on a mission to help companies build generational teams.
In the age of AI, the best teams are still built by the best people. Recruiting has become a zero-sum game where speed and quality decide who wins.
Contrario is a network of expert recruiters supercharged by vertical AI agents purpose-built for hiring. Teams at Wispr Flow, Listen Labs, Slash, and 200+ of the fastest-growing companies use Contrario to power their hiring.
In under six months, Contrario has crossed $6M in annualized revenue, paid out $1M+ to recruiters, and placed 150+ candidates — making it one of the fastest-growing AI recruiting platforms on the market.
Backed by Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners, Goodwater Capital, and Inventum Ventures, alongside angels including David Chen (ex-HRT), Abhijeet Dwivedi (OpenAI), Hank Couture (DoorDash), and Jerry Cain (Stanford CS). Built by Stanford dropouts. Headquartered in San Francisco.
