We built Stitch to hire our own team

Stitch did not start as a company. It started as an internal tool we built to solve our own hiring, and it worked so well that people demanded we let them use it. It is now the product thousands of candidates move through.

Built by ML engineers

Stitch was founded by myself (Alex Wilson) and Romain Rey. I was a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Microsoft, holding 11 AI patents, won national AI awards, and studied at Imperial College London. Romain was a Machine Learning Engineer at Google, where he scaled YouTube's search ranking to billions of users, and at Microsoft before that, and holds 14 AI patents. Many of those are together, so between us we hold 17 unique AI patents, and we are backed by leaders at DeepMind, Point72 Ventures, and Concept Ventures.

That background matters because it shaped how we approached hiring: as a data and modeling problem, not a numbers game.

We built a tool to hire our own team

Hiring engineers was painful, so we automated what actually worked: direct, personalized outreach to the best candidates, sent from our own accounts. Not job posts, not a recruiting agency, not a faceless recruiter inbox. The people we wanted were not looking, so we built a system to find and contact them.

It worked

It felt like magic. We were getting five to ten qualified interviews on our calendar per day, and we hired our first ML engineer, from AWS, within two weeks. He was not looking for a new role, but our system was looking for him. That is the whole thesis of Stitch in one hire: the best person for the role is usually not on the market, and you can still get them if you find them and reach out the right way.

From internal tool to product

We never meant to sell it. But word spread. Founders we knew saw the caliber of candidates we were meeting, and how uncannily well matched they were to our roles, asked what we were doing, and then asked to use it themselves. People offered to pay before we had a price. We said no, until saying no stopped making sense, and we turned the tool we built for ourselves into a product.

It works just as well for everyone else, often better: most customers see their first interview within hours, the average customer gets nine interview bookings in their first three days, and accepts around 90% of them.

If you are making that first hire yourself, we wrote down the approach in how to hire your first engineer. Or start a 14-day trial and put the same tool we built for ourselves on your roles.