How OnHires helped Archipelo build its core engineering team after emerging from stealth

Archipelo emerged from stealth with $12M in funding to address a problem that barely existed a few years earlier: as AI copilots and autonomous coding agents write an increasing share of production code, security and engineering leaders have lost visibility into who, or what, actually produced any given change. Building a system of record for that reality requires a small, senior engineering team capable of shipping a technically ambitious product quickly.

With funding secured and the product moving from stealth to market, Archipelo needed to build out its core engineering bench across interface, full stack, and data pipeline work simultaneously. Each role needed a senior engineer capable of owning significant scope independently, reflecting the reality of an early-stage team where there is no large existing codebase or established process to lean on.

OnHires was engaged to run this concentrated, senior-level search at a stage where every hire meaningfully shapes both the product and the engineering culture.

Early-stage cybersecurity startups compete for engineering talent against much larger, better-funded companies, and against each other, in an unusually crowded developer-security funding environment. Convincing senior engineers to join a four-person hiring push at a company just out of stealth requires a genuinely compelling technical story, not just competitive compensation.

The roles themselves demanded a rare combination: candidates needed to be senior enough to work with minimal oversight on a product still taking shape, while also being comfortable with the ambiguity of an early-stage codebase and evolving requirements. The data pipeline engineering role added domain-specific difficulty, requiring familiarity with the kind of large-scale event and attribution data that a developer security product like Salmon depends on.

Because Archipelo's product concept, attributing code to human and AI actors, was still novel to much of the market, candidates also needed enough technical curiosity and security-domain interest to evaluate an unfamiliar problem space quickly and buy into it before other opportunities pulled their attention elsewhere.

OnHires began by calibrating each engineering role around the specific ownership expectations of an early-stage team, senior interface, full stack, and data pipeline engineers who could work with minimal process and significant autonomy, rather than engineers optimized for a mature, well-documented codebase.

Sourcing prioritized senior engineers with prior early-stage or startup experience, screened for both technical depth and comfort with ambiguity through structured interviews focused on how candidates had previously approached undefined problems. For the data pipeline role specifically, OnHires targeted engineers with direct experience handling large-scale event or telemetry data relevant to Archipelo's attribution use case.

Given the concentrated nature of the search, OnHires ran tight weekly coordination with Archipelo's leadership throughout, prioritizing fast feedback and quick offer decisions to keep pace with a competitive market for senior engineering talent.

Archipelo completed 4 senior engineering hires spanning interface, full stack, and data pipeline work, giving the company the core technical bench needed to build out its product following its stealth launch. One placement later moved on from the company, a normal outcome at this hiring stage and did not require a replacement search.

The remaining engineers now form the foundation of Archipelo's product team, positioned to keep shipping against an ambitious roadmap as the company scales past its initial funding milestone.

Roles successfully filled:

Early-stage technical hiring is a different discipline from scaling an established engineering org. It means screening for autonomy and comfort with ambiguity as much as raw technical skill, and moving fast enough to win senior candidates who have other options.

By calibrating the search around what an early-stage engineering team actually needs, OnHires helped Archipelo build a core technical bench capable of executing on a genuinely novel product category.