Tech Talent Drop - Edition 33

Welcome to Edition 33 of Tech Talent Drop! 

Signals you can actually hire against: re:Invent’s agentic AI push, GitHub’s model upgrades, and fresh capital across AI, bio, fintech, and defense.

Listen to the podcast on the website here!

The Drop

AWS re:Invent: agents, chips, and AI factories
Amazon unveiled Graviton5 CPUs, Trainium3 UltraServers, Bedrock AgentCore, and AI Factory reference designs. Translation: near-term demand for platform reliability, MLOps, data engineering, and internal enablement to pilot agentic workflows on Bedrock.

OpenAI reprioritizes ChatGPT, pauses ad experiments
OpenAI is focusing resources on core ChatGPT improvements and delaying advertising initiatives; at the same time it announced enterprise partnerships with Accenture and an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, plus a seasonal NORAD collaboration. Expect more partner-engineer and solutions roles around enterprise rollouts.

GitHub Copilot ups its options
Copilot added public-preview support for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in Visual Studio and VS Code, and shipped Copilot Spaces updates including public spaces and easier file adds. Hiring signal: teams will value engineers who can evaluate model choice and design review workflows around AI-assisted edits.

Regulatory and market undercurrents
A U.S. ruling is set to force annual rebidding of default search/AI placement deals, which could shake up distribution for assistants embedded on devices and browsers. Keep an eye on how this affects user acquisition for AI tools your teams depend on.

AI Tool of the Week

Gem (Recruiting CRM & Outreach)
Use Gem to run multi-touch candidate sequences, see full-funnel pipeline analytics tied to your ATS, and benchmark reply/interest rates so top-of-funnel becomes predictable instead of vibes. Start with one persona, two sequences, and measure reply rate, qualified screens, and time-to-first-screen.

Hiring & Interview Insight

Skills-first and practical wins. Two fresh signals to shape your interview process:

• Teams that lean into skills-based searches are 12% more likely to make a quality hire (LinkedIn, 2025 Future of Recruiting UK).

• Developers overwhelmingly prefer real-world coding tasks over algorithm puzzles; roughly two-thirds choose practical assessments (HackerRank 2025 Developer Skills Report).

Apply it this week: swap a whiteboard round for a 60–75 minute task that mirrors the role, score with a rubric, and send written feedback within 48 hours.

Funding Watch

All announced this week — treat these as sourcing beacons.

• Black Forest Labs — image generation — $300M Series B at $3.25B valuation. Hiring: model training, evals, inference infra, partnerships.

• Excelsior Sciences — AI drug discovery — $95M (Series A + grant). Hiring: cheminformatics, ML for small molecules, automation, data engineering.

• Flex — AI finance OS for mid-market — $60M Series B. Hiring: data engineering, risk, integrations, fintech ops.

• Aaru — synthetic user research — Series A at ~$1B headline valuation. Hiring: agent safety/evals, enterprise integrations, product research.

• Quantum Systems — defense drones — €180M Series C extension; valuation > €3B. Hiring: perception, embedded, test, data ops.

Why it matters
Capital is clustering in agent platforms, generative media, bio-AI, fintech data, and dual-use autonomy. Expect demand in platform reliability, integrations, data governance, and partner engineering.

Quick Bytes

• Copilot Spaces added public spaces and better code-viewer integration — useful for onboarding and collaborative code reviews.

• OpenAI/NORAD partnership is a signal of seasonal, event-driven assistants — a reminder to harden your own agent guardrails and logging before holiday spikes.

• Search/AI defaults may face more churn after the new ruling; model distribution channels could shift faster than your annual plan.

What to do this week

1. Agent pilot on Bedrock. Pick one internal workflow, wire it to AgentCore, and set success metrics: latency, accuracy, human-in-the-loop coverage.

2. Gem A/B. Run two outreach sequences for the same persona; report reply rate, qualified screen rate, and time-to-first-screen in 14 days.

3. Copilot model check. Let a small squad compare GPT-family vs Claude 4.5 Opus for code review comments; log subjective quality plus diff size and bug catch rate.

4. Funding alerts. Set trackers for Black Forest Labs, Excelsior Sciences, Flex, Aaru, and Quantum Systems to catch early role posts and post-raise departures.
   

That’s all for this week’s Tech Talent Drop — stay informed, and see you next week!