Compiler Engineering Lead for a Global Web3 Startup

Case study · Nomic Labs (HardHat) · By the Axe Talent team

Nomic Labs, the team behind HardHat, needed someone who had invented a programming language and could run a department. Worldwide, that description fits a few dozen people, and every one of them is employed. Natalia Rostova and her team found the candidate at Meta in the US and won the offer against TechCrunch-featured startups. The lead is running Nomic's engineering team.

A pool you can count on your fingers

Programming language design is a small discipline. Shipping a language is rarer still, and doing it while leading engineers narrows the field to a handful. A job post reaches none of them. They are senior, employed, and finished with job boards years ago.

The second constraint decided the search. These engineers are moved by the technical problem. Compensation follows the decision, and any message that leads with money identifies the sender as someone who did not read the work.

Searching by evidence

Natalia and her team worked from the artefacts: languages shipped, compilers written, the design decisions visible in the code and in the talks. That is a different exercise from matching a title, and it is what separates an engineer who has used a compiler from one who has built it.

The candidate was at Meta. The first message spoke about the problem Nomic was solving, in the vocabulary of the field, and it opened a technical conversation. When competing offers landed from TechCrunch-featured startups, that conversation held, because it had been about the work since the beginning.

What happened

The Compiler Engineering Lead was hired and is effectively leading the engineering team at Nomic Labs.

Why this sits beside our research searches

A compiler engineer and a professor of machine learning look like different hires. Underneath they are the same one. Both leave their evidence in public work, both delete outreach from people who have not read it, and both move for the problem. Axe Talent is the first AI-native agency recruiting researchers for universities and industry with its own AI tools, and this search proved the method outside academia.

Start a search like this

Write to Natalia Rostova, Axe Talent Founder & Executive Headhunter, or book 20 minutes on Natalia's Calendar. Related: how to hire AI researchers and tech headhunters in Singapore.