“Acacia helped us meet & hire incredibly talented engineers in New York.” - Tom Eliaz, Co-Founder, Bedrock Robotics (From Stealth to Series B; Autonomous construction vehicles; $1.75 billion valuation 🤖🚜)
Acacia: Is it A-ka-see-ah or A-kay-sha?
We say A-ka-see-ah… that’s how founder Alston Chiang‘s family pronounced “Acacia Street” in the Philippines growing up.
However you say it, here’s what matters: our team of technical recruiting experts partner with top VC-backed startups & VCs (a16z, Index, Amplify, 8VC, Khosla, and more) across NYC and SF & from stealth/early-stage to hyper-growth later stage.
In 3 years, we’ve placed over 75 engineers at companies they’re genuinely excited about… like the first FDE at a non-hallucination AI model lab, or an engineer who reached 7 figures in equity within year 1 of employment, or someone who met their future spouse on the job!
What makes this worth your inbox:
Real signal, not noise. We’re in hundreds of conversations a week with founders, VCs, and engineers - working from their offices, hosting dinners, learning & growing together to stay close to the most talent dense ecosystems. So, what we share here comes directly from that…hiring trends, interview patterns, comp benchmarks… what’s actually happening at the companies everyone’s watching.
Early access. RE: the above - let’s just say we know about the important things before most. We can get you in front of companies before their next big fundraise or acquisition.
A long-term relationship. We reached out because we’ve crossed paths, and we play a long game. Whether you’re looking now or in 3 years, we’d love to continue the conversation. Our portfolio is always growing with new and exciting startups.
Expect open roles, market intel, event invites, and the occasional thing we think you’ll just find interesting.
TIPS & TOOLS practical stuff to help you interview, hire, or better understand the market
AI-Native Interviews Are Here:
Debugging interviews are rising in popularity: one of our hiring managers (ex-Staff at Twitter & Microsoft) leans on this framework + prep resources for their debugging round
Testing for product knowledge: Clients are expecting candidates to walk through an AI project that you’ve recently built – this needs to be something you’ve spent at least 20+ hours on (include it on your resume if you’re willing to share it publicly!)
OR build an MVP (minimal viable product) live in the interview: Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) says it best:
“If you’re creating a new product, what are the three (or fewer) key features that will make it so great that you can cut or half-ass everything else?”
A16z hosted a panel with one of our clients, Sola (Series A a16z AI-Native Process Automation): Learn more about how 3 different a16z portcos are interviewing candidates right now.
However, there is no industry standard: These are a few examples, but there are still a lot of companies running leetcode sessions. Most of our clients have adopted AI-native interviews, but we can’t speak for everyone... Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you probably still need to practice.
OPEN ROLES a sneak peek into our portfolio
Erebor · $625M raised · SoCal
Palmer Luckey’s federally chartered digital bank — the first built on stablecoin rails. Just launched in Feb 2026 & the eng team is 13 people. Backed by 8VC, Founders Fund, Lux, Bain, Haun. $4.35B valuation
Traction $1B in customer deposits in Q1, and their own bank core built from scratch for AI, defense, hardware, and crypto companies. Fastest OCC & FDIC approval in history (sub-9 months).
Roles Front-End, Back-End/Distributed Systems, Infrastructure/SRE, Generalist Engineers (all levels)
The current 13-person engineering team, all of whom relocated from SF/NYC/Seattle to Orange County, CA, includes former founders, CTOs, & incredible 0-1 contributors from Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, University of Waterloo, Google, Palantir, Cohere, Anthropic, Rippling, Coinbase, Mercury, Block, Column, Aptos Labs, Lyft, Pinwheel, Y Combinator, etc.
Runlayer · $11M Raised · #3 on Harmonic Hot 25 · Remote or NYC
The enterprise AI control plane — the MCP platform Anthropic itself uses. Lets companies move fast on AI without losing security, governance, or control. Four products: Platform (secured connector/agent layer), Watch (shadow AI discovery), Guard (security scanning model), and Embed (headless API).
Traction $11M raised from Khosla & Felicis. Gusto deployed to 1,800+ daily users in 90 days. Customers include Instacart, Opendoor, dbt Labs, Lemonade.
Roles Product Engineer, SRE, Identity Engineer, Security Engineer, Product Designer, Platform Engineer
Founded by the Zapier AI team — Andrew Berman (founder of Nanit), Tal Peretz (built Zapier MCP in two days, ex-IDF ML lead), Vitor Balocco (tech lead for Zapier Agents). Advisors: co-creator of MCP at Anthropic + Head of Security at Cursor.
Harper · $47M Raised · SF Onsite
The first AI-native commercial insurance brokerage — not software for brokers, the brokerage itself rebuilt from scratch. AI agents handle 90% of operational work across intake, placement, servicing, and renewals across 2,000+ carriers.
Traction $40K → ~$10M ARR in 16 months. 10,000+ customers from trucking to tech, construction to consulting. Grown 100x since last year. $47M Series A from Emergence.
Roles Tech Leads, Senior Engineers, Forward Deployed Engineers, Core/AI/Platform Engineers
2nd-highest revenue in YC W25. Adding ~1,000 customers per month.
TREND WATCH what’s actually happening in tech right now
The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — FDE job openings surged 800%+ in 2025 — so, we hosted an event (scroll down for even more on events!) to talk about it. Caitlin Leksana (CEO, Fazeshift), Jordan DeLoach (VP Eng, Scaled Cognition), and Kamesh Vedula (Founding FDE, Rippling) joined us to unpack it all.
The take-aways:
Strong FDEs tend to be ex-founders, product engineers, founding engineers, and/or solutions engineers with subject matter expertise in a certain domain.
Scope and day-to-day engineering work vary significantly by company size and customer type, meaning no two FDE roles look exactly alike.
The questions to ask if/when interviewing for an FDE position:
Is the FDE role fundamentally an engineering position? Our panelist ranged from 60–90% technical work — with client-facing responsibilities (meetings, travel, async comms) making up the remaining 10–40%.
What is the org structure? At companies with enterprise customers, FDEs may roll up to a GTM leader and span both pre- and post-sales technical work.
What are the KPIs of the role? What is the compensation break-down? Comp ranges may be slightly lower on base (~10%) but can include bonus & upside.
COMMUNITY & EVENTS come hang with us
We’ve had a busy few months hosting the NYC tech community out of our co-working place in Tribeca (that yes - does have a sunken living room & stunning rooftop 😏):
The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — April 20 Pics below. Info above in “TREND WATCH”
Power Hour — March 9 We hosted a workout + networking happy hour. Engineers, founders, PMs, and VCs came out for a HIIT session led by The Athletic Clubs, with free drinks, and good company:
Up Next: Q(ueer) & A(llies) in Tech — June 11 Not actually a Q&A. Really just a Pride party & networking for Tech peeps. Come celebrate & bring your friends! RSVP here - Event Page 🌈 💻 🥳
REFER SOMEONE know a great engineer or startup that’s hiring?
Intro us. $5k referral fees for placed candidates. Send ‘em our way → mary@acaciarecruits.com
Or come visit us IRL at Spring Place in NYC.