Featured in Business Insider: How Rounds is replacing the traditional resume.Featured in Business Insider
Read ArticleEngineers, placed.
Not posted.
Rounds is a recruiting partner for early-stage founders. We've helped 200+ companies hire engineers who actually ship — without the agency overhead, the resume spam, or the six-month timelines.
Rounds is a ZF company — and we love Cory.
A track record, not a pitch deck.
Three steps. No fluff.
Most agencies front-load process. We front-load shortlists. You spend your time interviewing — not aligning on a target persona for the third time.
One call. Real specs.
30 minutes with a founder, not an account manager. We figure out what you actually need to ship in the next two quarters — then translate that into a search.
Vetted candidates only.
Every engineer is technically screened by us before you see them. No résumé spam. We surface 3–5 people we'd hire at our own company, and you decide who to interview.
We help land the offer.
Compensation benchmarks, reference checks, counter-offer strategy. We stay in the loop until your new hire signs and starts — and we replace them if it doesn't work out.
We spent 4 months trying to recruit our founding engineer. Rounds found us the right one in weeks and he's still with us today.
Built for founders, not HR.
You don't have a talent team yet. You don't have time to read 400 résumés. You need someone who's done this 200+ times and won't waste your week.
Real technical screens.
Every candidate goes through our screen before you see them. We don't pass through anyone we wouldn't be willing to defend on a call with a founder we respect — which is roughly all of them.
Speed without compromise.
Most early-stage roles are filled in weeks, not months — but only when the shortlist is actually good. We optimize for shortlist quality first; speed follows naturally when the candidates are right.
200+ companies of pattern matching.
We've run searches across consumer, B2B SaaS, AI, infra, fintech, and dev tools. We know what “founding engineer” means at a 5-person team versus a 50-person one — and we hire accordingly.
Replacement guarantee.
Standard for the industry, but worth saying: if a placement doesn't work out, we run the search again. We've earned repeat business because we treat every placement like our reputation is on the line — because it is.
Z Fellows is an investor in Rounds.
Which is part of why portfolio companies tend to find us. We're actively running searches across the Z Fellows community — here's one of them.
For founders ready to hire
Hire your next engineer through us.
30-minute intro call. We'll tell you whether we can help — and if we can't, we'll tell you who can. No pitch deck, no pipeline.