FDE Hiring Playbook·Part II, Sourcing and Evaluation
Chapter 04Sourcing and Evaluation3 min read

Sourcing channels

What you’ll learn

Three tiers of alumni pools, founder-factory networks worth chasing warm intros for, communities, talent platforms, and a GitHub sourcing checklist.

Highest-yield alumni pools

Tier 1

verified FDE training grounds

  • Palantir (FDSE, Delta, Deployment Strategist / Echo)
  • Ramp (~16 FDEs in pods, Aug 2025)
  • OpenAI (Colin Jarvis leading; openings US/UK/DE/FR/JP)
  • Anthropic (Applied AI Engineer / FDE / Technical Deployment Lead with multi-region presence)
  • Scale AI (post-Meta acquisition; alumni circulating)
  • Anduril (heavy Palantir alumni concentration)
  • Databricks (field engineers, ex-MosaicML)

Tier 2

high-yield via customer-facing engineering culture

  • Stripe (early Solutions Architects + RFA team)
  • Snowflake field engineers, Rippling, Brex early eng, Plaid, Vercel DX/DevRel
  • Linear, Notion (early eng + AI team), Replit (AI agent engineers), Cursor, Sierra, Glean
  • Harvey (Applied team), Decagon (‘Agent Product Managers’)
  • Cognition (Devin), Mercor, Hebbia, Mistral, ElevenLabs
  • Pallet (logistics AI; FDE team active), HappyRobot ($44M Series B Sept 2025)
  • Serval (Jake Stauch), Superblocks, Northslope (Palantir-native FDE-as-a-service, $22M Series A Jan 29 2026)

Tier 3

heterogeneous quality, filter hard

  • McKinsey QuantumBlack, BCG X / BCG Gamma, Bain Vector, Accenture Liquid Studio / Gen AI Studio, Deloitte AI Institute
  • Google Cloud Customer Engineering, AWS Pro Serve, Azure FastTrack

Founder factory networks (warm intros worth chasing)

  • Palumni VC (Luba Lesiva), exclusively backs Palantir alumni: palumni.vc.
  • Concept VC (London), backs ex-Palantir teams.
  • Friends & Family Capital (founded by ex-Palantir CFO Colin Anderson).
  • Goldcrest Capital (Adam Ross, ex-Palantir board).
  • XYZ Capital, heavy Palantir alumni focus.

Communities and Slack/Discord (2025–2026)

Online communities:

  • Latent Space Discord (swyx), the most active AI Engineer community.
  • MLOps Community Slack (~70,000 members).
  • DataTalks.Club Slack.
  • Hugging Face Discord.
  • r/LocalLLaMA, r/MachineLearning.
  • South Park Commons(Fund IV $500M raising Jan 2026), the premier ‘−1 to 0’ community for ex-Stripe / Facebook / Dropbox / OpenAI engineers between gigs.

Newsletters and talent platforms

Read these every week:

VC talent networks

  • Sequoia Atlas, atlas.sequoiacap.com.
  • a16z talent (College Talent Network, Speedrun, Talentplace).
  • General Catalyst portfolio job board.
  • First Round Talent (Tiffany Siu, ex-Palantir recruiter).

GitHub sourcing

Where the best candidates live the worst on LinkedIn, mine contributor lists of LangChain, LlamaIndex, Inspect, Promptfoo, Braintrust, Arize Phoenix, Ragas, DSPy, Anthropic SDK, OpenAI Cookbook, vLLM, Modal, Baseten, MCP server repos.

GitHub sourcing checklist

Use to filter contributor profiles

Search Github for users with the following profile: PRs (last 90 days) merged into LangChain, LlamaIndex, vLLM, Modal, Braintrust, Arize Phoenix, Ragas, DSPy, MCP server repos.

Look for:
• Recent (last 90 days) commits to AI infra repos.
• README quality on personal agent/RAG repos with architecture diagrams.
• 'Compulsive shipper' pattern of many small repos vs. one bloated one.
• Mixed languages (TypeScript + Python + Go) signaling full-stack.

Key takeaways

  • Tier 1 = verified FDE training grounds (Palantir, Ramp, OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale, Anduril, Databricks).
  • The best candidates live worst on LinkedIn. Mine GitHub contributor lists for AI infra repos (LangChain, Inspect, Promptfoo, MCP servers).
  • Palumni VC (palumni.vc) and Concept VC are warm-intro paths to the strongest ex-Palantir founder networks.