How ESAI found a rare CTO in 8 weeks with Superposition

ESAI is an AI platform that helps students tell better stories and get into college. The product gives students and families individualized admissions support at a price point that is closer to software than to a private consultant.

Julia built ESAI after seeing how expensive advisors and overloaded school counselors shut most students out of real guidance. Over two years she and a set of contract engineers shipped tools that have already helped more than half a million students apply to college. For a mission like that, the technical foundation matters. She needed a partner who could own the product, not just ship tickets.

For ESAI, hiring a head of engineering was not a nice to have. It was the difference between a working MVP held together by contractors and a durable company that could keep up with demand from students, parents, and schools.

By the time Julia started this search, ESAI had real traction and a clear mission, but no long term technical owner. As a mostly non-technical founder she had relied on a mix of contract engineers and overseas teams. That got her to a solid product, but she knew she was overdue for what she called "a true technical partner and a very experienced CTO."

The brief was unusually specific. She needed someone senior enough to lead engineering and architecture, fluent in AI, and genuinely excited about the college admissions problem. They had to care about access, ethics, and the students ESAI serves, not just the tech. Julia assumed that combination would be hard to find.

She tried to run the search herself. She leaned on her network, asked for warm intros, and spent late nights DMing candidates on LinkedIn. It started to feel like running a second fundraise or sales funnel on top of everything else, with none of the leverage.

"I had dabbled in DMing candidates on LinkedIn and creating that outbound funnel, and I just started to realize this was going to be an incredibly time consuming thing."

Traditional recruiters were an option in theory, but writing a forty thousand dollar check for a single role did not make sense for an early stage company whose whole mission is affordability and access.

Julia decided to try Superposition. Instead of filling out a form, she started with a voice conversation with the agent. She talked through the state of ESAI, why this role mattered, and the kind of person she wanted at her side.

"Talking to Superposition was a surprisingly natural experience. It pushed me to go deeper on my own JD and ask questions I hadn't previously asked myself."

The conversation did more than collect requirements. The agent challenged vague phrases, asked her to choose between must haves and nice to haves, and pushed on over strict technical filters that would have shrunk the pool. By the end Julia had a sharper view of the role and a job description that reflected what she actually needed: a product minded technical leader who could own decisions, not just implement them.

Once the role was onboarded, the work shifted into Slack. Superposition ran outbound searches, wrote personalized outreach using ESAI's voice, and handled the back and forth with interested candidates. Every time someone promising replied, the agent introduced them into a shared Slack channel with a short rationale: why they matched, what in their background mapped to Julia's criteria, and what to look for in an interview. Pass or proceed was a reaction emoji, not another hour lost to sourcing.

"Superposition solved the problem of filling the role we desperately needed and the problem of time, which is something I don't have a lot of as a startup founder."

Over eight weeks the agent surfaced 28 head-of-engineering candidates who met the bar for seniority, AI experience, and stage fit. As Julia gave feedback, Superposition adjusted the search, quietly learning what "ESAI-shaped" really meant. Instead of spreadsheets and manual notes, most of the hiring conversation happened in the Slack channel shared with the agent.

One candidate in particular stood out. He had the full stack and leadership background she needed, plus something extra that matched ESAI's ethos: years spent building a huge creator community to help people break into tech from nontraditional paths. His experience teaching coding and AI at scale made him an immediate philosophical match for a company focused on access.

"Not only did he have the right background and leadership experience, he had something that stood out to me, and it was just pretty surreal that Superposition uncovered him."

That candidate became ESAI's head of engineering and CTO-level partner. The entire search, from call to offer, was run by an agent that Julia now describes as being as effective as a headhunter, just without a human in the loop after kickoff.

Filling this role changed how Julia thinks about hiring. What used to feel intimidating and amorphous now feels like a clear workflow: talk to the agent, sharpen the role together, watch a curated set of candidates appear in Slack, and spend her time only where it matters, in conversation with people who are already strong matches.

When other founders ask how she met her CTO, she tells them the truth, that an agent sourced her right hand partner, end to end. The usual reaction is disbelief, then a request for the link.

Looking ahead, Julia expects Superposition to be the default way ESAI opens senior roles, from future engineering leaders to specialist AI and data hires. Each search teaches the agent more about what a great ESAI hire looks like, so the next one should be even tighter. The persistent "go find someone amazing" task that sat in the back of her mind for months is gone, which leaves more attention for what matters most to her, building tools that help students tell their stories and get into the right schools for them.