How Robinhood’s former recruiting lead finds cracked engineers using Vamo API

The engineers Peter needed were impossible to find

Peter made 200+ hires at Robinhood. Now he runs his own agency, recruiting for early-stage startups that need people like core TypeScript contributors and compiler engineers.

Those people rarely look impressive on LinkedIn. Searching by school, company or title kept surfacing the wrong engineers. Even when a good one showed up, figuring out who was actually cracked meant sifting through profiles and digging into their work one by one.

So he stopped searching by résumé and started searching by the work.

Searching by the work made it fast and easy

“Now you can just fan out. You can look into repos directly and find the people doing that.”

Peter didn’t learn a new tool. He asks Claude in plain language for engineers doing compiler or language-tooling work, and Vamo brings back the people whose GitHub proves it.

Every result comes back with their real work already attached, so the sifting he used to do by hand is done before he looks at a single profile.

Vamo found the engineers his other tools missed

“It’s not about what logos they have or what school they went to. It’s what did this person actually do. Vamo tells you that in a publicly verifiable way.”

Two weeks into a search that normally takes four, Vamo had surfaced cracked engineers no conventional search would have found. Several are now in technical rounds:

1. 01 The CTO of a small company in Virginia who is one of GitHub’s most-followed contributors.
2. 02 An undergrad at Santa Clara University with an “open to work” banner on LinkedIn, which Peter calls “a huge anti-signal.” His repos showed he’d built serious things.
3. 03 A core contributor to the world’s #1 chess engine, who also built one of the top five chess engines in the world.

The bottom line

“Honestly, I’m a little sad this is going to help other recruiters find these people too.”