It looks like any other tech company: cracked founders, exorbitant valuations, and minimalist Silicon Valley offices.
But joining this group of AI startups is no small feat.
As the competition for top engineers intensifies, the hottest AI coding startups are flipping the hiring scenario on its head and finding unconventional ways to separate top builders from resume polishers.
Let’s take a look inside five of them Recruiting at vibe coding startups like Cursor, Cognition, Base44, and Replit.
1. Intense courtship
In the AI talent war, top engineers and researchers are not applying for jobs on portals. They are being courted like coveted NBA draft picks.
Before the SpaceX acquisition, AI coding startup Cursor grew at breakneck speed.
Although the company boasts hundreds of employees, CEO Michael Tuell personally scanned X and GitHub profiles for undiscovered engineers, former founders, and employees at companies like Notion and Figma, employees said.
Cursor CEO Michael Truell is known for his personal involvement in recruiting. HumanX Conference Big Event Media/Getty Images
Cursor’s courtship begins with an email from Tuer himself, and could get more intense from there.
“If someone has a reputation, they’ll be happy to bomb you,” said one former employee. “Everyone is contacting you out of the blue,” she said, with employees asking potential candidates to go get coffee and then stop by the office.
Top staff at Cognition, an AI-coding startup with a market capitalization of $26 billion, are also working hard to stay afloat in the war for talent.
Emily Cohen, the company’s human resources director, said she has traveled around the world to meet potential employees in person.
“Last week, I drove a candidate to the airport because I wanted to be the last person they talked to before they left San Francisco,” Cohen told Business Insider.
2. Death of resume
Having a perfect resume will do little to help you land an interview at a top-notch coding company.
Replit, LinkedIn profile and resume Stacey La Torre, the company’s chief human resources officer, said X has largely been replaced as the “primary medium” for recruiting.
“We have a Slack channel called Talent Spot where people can basically say, ‘I connected with this person on LinkedIn, or I met this person at a conference or at X,'” La Torre said. “I don’t know them well enough to introduce them, but I think they are great talents and will be great here at Replit.”
Base44’s CEO said they are scanning people posting projects online. Base44
Maor Shlomo, CEO of Wix-owned vibe coding platform Base44, said the company “hunts down” talented people who share their projects and publish their research online on GitHub.
“For us, this is the best diploma, right?” he said.
3. One day goodbye–site
Seven interviews and LeetCode have been released.
Instead, AI coding startups like Cursor and General Catalyst-backed Kilo are opting for multi-day work trials and week-long bootcamps.
Cursor is famous in Silicon Valley for its unpaid, multi-day work trials.
According to Cursor employees, candidates will essentially do everything a full-time employee would do. They sit at their desks on their company laptops, complete projects using frozen versions of Cursor’s codebase, and even publish their work at the end.
In one instance, a former Curser employee said the company refused to hire a management-level candidate after a month-long job trial in which the person met with nearly the entire team.
“At the end of the month, they were like, ‘Maybe we can do better than this candidate,'” the employee said, noting how high the bar was for new entrants and how it was an effective recruiting strategy.
Kilo CEO Scott Breitenother said these exams weed out people who look good on paper and might pass a traditional interview, but don’t have the initiative needed for a fast-paced AI startup.
“We will meet with all of us in Amsterdam and start in person. We will be shipping a functional product the next day,” Breitenoser said of Kilo’s latest overseas bootcamp. “Many people take their PTO out of their current job and come work with Kilo during our intensive week. Then, once they pass, they leave their job.”
Breitenother said the company hired five engineers during the last such focus week.
4. Interview Question: Token Spending and Founder Mode
At Accel-backed vibecoding startup Rocket, technical interviews start with the same question. How many tokens do you spend each week on work and personal projects?
“If you’re not using LLM to optimize and streamline your work, how can you match the speed of Rocket?” said Deepak Dhanak, the company’s chief operating officer. “If you’re not using or burning an abnormal amount of tokens, you’re not experimenting enough.”
He said interviewers are keen to find people in founder mode, and even rank-and-file employees need to demonstrate ownership and relentless effort.
In addition to asking about token spending, Dhanak asks each candidate if they can call him if something breaks at 3 a.m.
Kilo’s Breitenother asks candidates: “If you were the CEO of your previous company, what do you think you would have done?”
He added: “I think it shows whether people can think about the big picture and understand that it’s a business, and it requires them to be thoughtful.”
Shlomo said he always asks potential employees where they want to be in five years.
“We still have a lot of experience to go through before we can say we’ve built something really special,” said Base44’s CEO. “If they’re looking for the best thing, like work-life balance, I don’t know if we’re the best option.”
5. Embrace AI
In May, Business Insider reported that Google was piloting a new interview process that would allow software engineering candidates to use AI during interviews.
Base44, Replit, and Cognition were way ahead of the game.
Cognition’s Cohen said the company is constantly changing its interview process to adapt to advances in AI.
“I think it’s like letting a kid take a math test without using a calculator,” she said of not allowing the use of AI in interviews. “For much of the building of things similar to what you do in your role, you can and should use AI tools.”
Interviews are being redesigned for AI.
“Many of the best engineers I know won’t pass some of the interviews they get at companies, so we have a lot of work to do,” said Base44’s Shlomo. “One is to ask engineers how to build Base44 without knowing what it looks like from the inside.”
He added, “AI is so good that you can even ask someone to build a project with you and see how it goes in an hour-long interview.”