A real network
15,000+ first-degree connections across engineering, product and revenue. Warm intros go out before cold outreach does.
Operator-grade search for AI companies. We build the AI development teams that ship the product and the revenue teams that sell it — seed to unicorn, globally distributed, nothing padded in between.
# One call. No deck. Role in, market map out. $ avalon open --team ai-dev,gtm --stage series-a Avalon Chase — search initialized ai_dev ...... research · post-training · inference · platform gtm ......... CRO · VP Sales · founding AE · sales engineering regions ..... US · EU · CIS · APAC comp band ... benchmarked before outreach, not after → ranked shortlist, with the reasoning attached # Contingent work is billed on start date. Not before.
01 The problem
An AI company at seed has to hire two completely different populations at once: the people who can hold a training run in their head, and the people who can sell the result to a sceptical buyer. Technical agencies fumble the second. Sales agencies never had a shot at the first.
02 Services
No account-manager handoff, no junior sourcer doing outreach under someone else's name. Pick the engagement that fits the role — the person behind it does not change.
Contingent search across both tracks. AI builders — research, infrastructure, applied engineering, founding engineers. Revenue operators — founding AEs, sales engineers, DevRel. Sourced hard, screened harder, shipped fast.
Dedicated bandwidth for the roles that cannot fail: CRO, VP Sales, Head of AI, VP Engineering, founding engineer. You get a guaranteed slot in the week and a written report at the end of it.
Full intel on the talent graph across AI and revenue. Who is building what, who is carrying a number and hitting it, where they sit, what they cost, and who is actually movable — before you open the req.
Org design, compensation strategy, levelling, interview loop design, employer brand, and the HR-tech stack underneath it. For teams who intend to hire in-house and want to do it properly.
Not ready for an agency relationship? We run your pipeline as part of your team, by the month — your ATS, your employer brand, our sourcing and our network.
03 Coverage
The AI development team and the go-to-market team are hired from different worlds, on different timelines, against different bars. We run both, which is why the sales engineer we send you can actually hold a conversation with the engineer we sent you last quarter.
Research scientists and engineers, post-training and RLHF, reinforcement learning, evaluation, interpretability, alignment. Found through papers, labs and referrals — not job boards.
Inference and serving, distributed training, GPU and scheduling, data platform, MLOps, and the applied engineers turning models into product. Found through GitHub, OSS and the network.
CRO, VP Sales, sales leadership, founding account executives, sales engineers, developer relations, technical product. People who sell to engineers because they can talk to engineers.
04 Method
Recruitment goes wrong in the dark. Every search runs on the same visible sequence, and you get the working notes at each stage — including the people who said no, and why.
$ avalon run --role "Founding Engineer, AI infra" [01] intake 30 minutes. Role, bar, dealbreakers, comp reality, and an honest read on whether the role is fillable. [02] map The addressable market, graded against your bar. Who exists, where they sit, what moves them. [03] outreach Written by a person, sent by a person. Warm intros from the first-degree network before cold outreach. [04] screen Depth check before you spend a minute. Motivation, comp expectation, notice period, visa, references. [05] shortlist Five to eight, ranked, with the reasoning written down. Plus the near-misses and why they missed. [06] close Comp modelling, counter-offer prep, resignation coaching, and contact until day one. status: you are never guessing what happened this week
05 Why this desk
This page lives on centralintelligence.online for a reason. Central Intelligence is our own open-source memory layer for AI agents — built, benchmarked and shipped by the same desk that runs your search. Very few recruiters can say that. None of them can say it about your competitors' searches.
A candidate's GitHub, papers and OSS contributions are the screen — not a keyword match on their headline. We can tell whether the interesting commit was actually theirs.
Good AI engineers get twenty messages a week. Ours land because they describe the real technical problem, correctly, in the first two lines — and because we can answer the follow-up.
On the revenue side we screen on what was actually closed, into which segment, against which quota — and we bring current comp data from live searches, in your region.
06 Pricing
Three ways to engage. No exclusivity demands on contingent work, no hourly billing on mapping, and no invoice before somebody starts.
The default. You pay only when a hire starts.
For roles that cannot fail, or markets that are genuinely thin.
For teams hiring in-house who want the market view.
07 Where we actually operate
Every search runs across the same channels: a first-degree network built by hand, open-source and research trails, operator referrals, and people we have already placed. Here is what that covers.
Stage focus is seed through unicorn — the range where a single wrong hire is still felt across the whole company.
| Track | Function | Regions | Primary channels |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI development | Research & post-training | US · EU · CIS | Papers, labs, referrals |
| AI development | Infrastructure & platform | US · EU · CIS · APAC | GitHub, OSS maintainers |
| AI development | Applied & product engineering | Global | First-degree network, forums |
| Go-to-market | Revenue leadership — CRO, VP Sales | US · EU | Operator network, referrals |
| Go-to-market | Founding AE, sales engineering, DevRel | US · EU · APAC | Operator network, referrals |
15,000+ first-degree connections across engineering, product and revenue. Warm intros go out before cold outreach does.
One operator owns the search end to end. The person on your intake call is the person writing the outreach.
Bands come from offers we have seen this quarter, in the regions you are hiring in — not last year's survey.
Thirty minutes, no deck. We map the role, the market and the specific AI builders or revenue operators you need to land this quarter — plus an honest answer on how hard it will be.