The junior engineer used to be the safe first hire. Cloë Stanbridge says AI just made that job disappear, and that's only the start of what's rewriting tech hiring right now.
In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree, one of Australia's most active venture capital firms. Cloë spends her days helping early-stage founders make their first engineering hires and helping later-stage companies scale their teams, work she's done from both sides, having previously led talent through a hypergrowth stretch at SafetyCulture and embedded inside scaling companies at The Lab17. They get into what actually makes a founder an "outlier" worth backing, why some founders eventually have to admit they've become the bottleneck in their own company, why the traditional junior engineer role is disappearing, and how Airtree's new Frontiers program is drawing hundreds of applications from engineers ready to go out on their own.
It's a hiring-trenches conversation full of specific, hard-won detail: the real numbers behind scaling a team from 60 to 350 people, why some recruiters place better talent because they simply know the team better, the AI tools on both sides of the hiring desk, and the line that sums up what's actually scarce in tech right now: everyone can build, not everyone can sell.
Chapters
0:00 Cold open: why the junior engineer is disappearing
0:40 What this episode covers
1:40 Welcome: Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree
1:56 A day in the life of a VC talent lead
2:10 Investing from pre-seed to growth stage
2:57 How talent gets involved at each stage
4:15 What makes a founder an "outlier"
5:02 Hiring the first few engineers
5:48 Case study: scaling a young founder's team
7:39 When a technical founder gets pulled in every direction
9:01 Hiring junior engineers in the age of AI
11:03 Why "junior" now means doing mid-level work
12:05 The fear of hiring someone more senior than you
13:02 When founders step back into R&D
13:32 Zero-to-one vs. scaling personalities
14:08 Inside Airtree's Frontiers program
15:24 Why engineers are leaving big companies to found startups
15:57 Retention, ESOP, and leaner teams
16:45 Why managers now need to be hands-on architects
17:25 Why no job is safe from redundancy anymore
18:39 The squeeze on middle management
19:34 Hiring people leaders too late
21:34 What actually keeps people "sticky"
21:58 Leadership lessons from Brené Brown and Kim Scott
22:41 Embedding inside scale-ups at The Lab17
25:15 Setting a new hire up to succeed, or fail
27:49 How the market flipped after COVID
28:21 When a huge engineer salary is worth it
31:08 Competing with Silicon Valley salaries
31:37 How Linktree built culture as a differentiator
32:52 Cash versus flexibility in a cost-of-living crisis
33:40 Being upfront about the grind before they sign
35:20 Remote work and the culture question
36:55 Why go-to-market matters more than ever
37:46 Expanding into the US market
40:10 Do founders have to relocate for funding?
41:34 Bringing Australian talent back home
42:36 From 60 to 350: scaling at SafetyCulture
47:04 Why recruiters need to know "their dog's name"
47:46 Being a thought partner, not a salesperson
48:47 Hiring for potential over a checklist
50:39 Why problem-solving beats a technical checklist
51:47 How AI is changing technical interviews
53:38 Trial days: hiring by actually working together
55:25 Screening out "AI slop" in applications
56:21 Spotting an AI-written cover letter
57:34 Using AI without losing the human element
57:52 Where voice agents fit and where they don't
58:39 The AI tools Cloë uses to research candidates
59:25 Cloë's top 3 AI skills for recruiting
1:00:45 James's AI-powered morning brief
1:01:58 Wrap-up and thanks
1:02:11 James's takeaways from the episode
About the Guest
Cloë Stanbridge is Talent Lead at Airtree, where she partners with the firm's portfolio to connect founders with top talent, build scalable hiring processes, and develop playbooks that support sustainable growth. Before Airtree, she spent over four years at The Lab17, embedding inside scaling companies including Linktree and Immutable to build out their hiring practices, and led talent through a hypergrowth stretch at SafetyCulture, taking the engineering team from around 60 people to 350 in two years.
Links
- Cloë Stanbridge · Airtree · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cloestanbridge/
- James MacDonald — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-macdonald-au/
- NTP Talent: https://ntptalent.com.au/
- Day One: https://dayone.fm/
Hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.
Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.
