How a non-technical founder lost 10 weeks hiring the wrong agentic AI engineer

A seed-stage AI startup founded in 2024 in the US that helps mid-market shippers with autonomous decision-making needed to hire an Agentic AI engineer.

Location: USAIndustry: Logistics Technology (LogTech)

Why were they hiring for this role?

Ryan Callahan, the founder was stuck and needed an AI engineer for a new feature that was tailor-made for a regional grocery distributor.

Ryan posted on LinkedIn. Rolled an offer, he accepted but about 10 weeks later they didn’t work out. Why? The engineer couldn’t translate his experience into workable features.

We asked Ryan what made this engineer a bad hire and on further discussions found out that he only looked at the tech stacks and skills and wasn’t able to see whether those skills actually led to any concrete outcomes.

The problem is a gap that doesn’t show up on resumes. There is a difference between an engineer who has built LLM-powered features, adding intelligence to an existing product and an Agentic AI Engineer who has built autonomous decision logic that holds up against unpredictable, incomplete, real-world enterprise data.

What did we screen the profiles for?

Ryan came to us for this role in September 2025 and once we got the complete brief, we started screening for resumes for these things:

• Has to have startup experience specifically in building 0 to 1.
• Has to have mentioned the outcomes they have driven with these tech stacks in their resume.
• Have good communication skills since they will be working remotely.

We also asked him to go deeper in his technical rounds like:

• Have they built autonomous decision logic that ran unsupervised against real enterprise data? What did production teach you that testing didn’t?
• Walk me through an edge case your agent hit in production. What broke? How did you catch it?

These kinds of questions catch the real depth.

Who finally made the cut?

The engineer we helped place had 4 years of experience working at a startup in Bengaluru on-site and was part of their 0 to 1 journey.

He had previously worked in a global team setup so we knew he would be able to communicate well remotely.

And in October 2025, 23 days from his first call with us, Ryan onboarded a remote engineer. Remember the custom feature they had to make for the grocery distributor? All done & live.

That’s the power of a good hire. When you match the right background to the right stage.

Hiring fast with a hiring partner does not necessarily mean you get weaker profiles. Partnering with the right agency will help you get good profiles faster and hire better.