A narrow, high-conviction 59-day search built around one exact-fit candidate, closing at $300K total comp.
AthenaHQ, an AI-powered search and discovery platform for consumer brands, needed a player-coach Engineering Manager: someone who could still code, mentor a small team, and partner directly with the CEO and CTO on technical direction. Series A-C experience, San Francisco, on-site.
This wasn't a volume search. Of 217 candidates in the system, almost all of the real work concentrated on one exact-fit candidate we identified early and pursued directly, and it closed in under two months.
An engineering leader who joined a prior company right after its Series A, worked up from Senior Software Engineer through Staff Engineer to Engineering Manager, and built that company's first dedicated platform team from scratch. By the time of this search they were overseeing three of that company's four engineering teams and had personally led the launch of an AI-powered product feature.
The offer started at $275K and was revised up to $300K total comp during negotiation, a genuine reflection of how competitive this candidate's market was.
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