They seem like any other tech company: cracked founders, sky-high valuations, and minimalistic Silicon Valley offices.
But getting into this group of AI startups is no easy feat.
As competition for top engineers reaches a fever pitch, the buzziest AI coding startups are flipping the script on recruiting and finding unconventional ways to separate top builders from résumé polishers.
Here’s a look inside five of the recruiting practices at vibe-coding startups like Cursor, Cognition, Base44, and Replit.
1. Intense courtship
In the AI talent war, top engineers and researchers aren’t applying for jobs on a portal. They’re being wooed like coveted NBA draft picks.
Pre-SpaceX acquisition, AI coding startup Cursor grew at breakneck speed.
Employees say that even as the company boasted a few hundred employees, CEO Michael Truell scanned X and GitHub profiles himself in search of undiscovered engineers, former founders, and employees at companies like Notion and Figma.
Cursor’s courtship started with an email from Truell himself and could get more intense from there.
“If someone has a reputation, they will almost love bomb them,” one former employee said. “Everyone’s reaching out to you all of a sudden,” with employees asking a prospective candidate to meet for coffee, then to swing by the office.
Top staff at $26 billion Cognition, the second-most valuable AI coding startup, are working hard to keep up in the talent war, too.
Emily Cohen, the startup’s head of people, said she has flown across the world to meet a potential employee in person.
“Just 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 the résumé
A perfect résumé does little to land you an interview at a top vibe-coding company.
At Replit, LinkedIn profiles and résumés have nearly been replaced by X, the “main medium” for recruiting, said the company’s chief people officer, Stacey La Torre.
“We have a Slack channel called Talent Spot for people to basically say, ‘Hey, I connected with this person on LinkedIn, or I met them at a conference or on X,” La Torre said. “I don’t know them well enough to make a referral, but I think they’re great talent and they’d be great talent here at Replit.'”
Maor Shlomo, the CEO of Wix-owned vibe-coding platform Base44, said the company will “hunt down” impressive people who share their projects on GitHub or publish their research online.
“For us, this is the best diploma, right?” he said.
3. Goodbye one-day on–sites
Seven rounds of interviews and LeetCode are out.
Instead, AI coding startups like Cursor and General Catalyst-backed Kilo are opting for multi-day work trials and weeklong bootcamps.
Cursor is Silicon Valley-famous for its unpaid, multi-day work trials.
According to Cursor employees, candidates do essentially everything they would as full-time employees: sit at a desk with a company laptop, work off a frozen version of Cursor’s codebase to complete projects, and even present their work at the end.
In one instance, a former Cursor employee said that the company declined to hire a management-level candidate after a monthlong work trial in which the person met nearly every member of the team.
“At the end of the month, they were like, ‘We could probably do better than this candidate,'” the employee said, pointing to how high the bar was for new entrants — and how it was an effective recruiting strategy.
Kilo’s CEO, Scott Breitenother, said that these trials filter out people who may look great on paper and pass traditional interviews, but don’t have the initiative needed at a fast-paced AI startup.
“You will meet us all in Amsterdam and start in person, and you’re expected to be shipping product that features the next day,” Breitenother said about Kilo’s latest overseas bootcamp. “A lot of folks will take PTO off their current job, come to work with Kilo for our focus week, and then if they make the cut, they’ll quit their job.”
Breitenother said the company hired five engineers during its last such focus week.
4. Interview questions: token spend and founder mode
At Accel-backed vibe-coding startup Rocket, technical interviews start with the same question: How many tokens are you consuming every week at work and on personal projects?
“If you are not using LLMs to optimize your work and become efficient, how are you going to match the speed of Rocket?” said Deepak Dhanak, the startup’s chief operating officer. “If you are not using and burning tokens in crazy amounts, you’re not experimenting enough.”
He said interviewers are scouting hard for people in founder mode — even rank-and-file employees should display ownership and relentless hustle.
Besides asking about token spend, Dhanak asks each candidate if he can call them if something is broken at 3 a.m.
Kilo’s Breitenother asks candidates: “If you were CEO of your last job, what would you have done?”
He added, “It tells you if people can think big picture and understand that it’s a business, and I think it challenges 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 things to go through until we can say we built something truly special,” the Base44 CEO said. “If they’re looking for the best, I don’t know, work-life balance and stuff like that, I’m not sure we’re the best option out there.”
5. Embracing AI usage
In May, Business Insider reported that Google was piloting a new interview process that allows software engineering candidates to use AI during their interviews.
Base44, Replit, and Cognition were way ahead of the game.
Cognition’s Cohen said that the company constantly changes its interview process to adjust for AI’s advancements.
“I guess this is like asking a kid to take a math test without a calculator,” she said about not allowing AI use in interviews. “For the bulk of building something similar to what you would do on the role, you can and should use AI tools.”
Interviews are being redesigned for AI.
“A lot of the best engineers that I know of wouldn’t pass some of those interviews that you get in corporates. So there is a bunch of stuff that we do,” Base44’s Shlomo said. “One is we ask engineers how would they build Base44 without them knowing how it looks like from the inside.”
He added, “AI is so insane that you can also ask them to build a project with you in the interview inside an hour and see how it goes.”
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