Eskildsen: Turbopuffer interview debriefs default to rejecting candidates unless championed
Simon Eskildsen · Retrieval After RAG: Hybrid Search, Agents, and Database Design — Simon Eskildsen of Turbopuffer · Mar 12, 2026 · at 44:49
Simon Eskildsen, founder of vector search startup Turbopuffer, discusses their internal rubric for hiring elite technical talent.
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“And so I have a document called Traits of the P-Nine engineer, and it's a bullet point list, and I look at that list after every single interview that I do, and in every single recap that we do, and every recap we end with, I end with some version of, I'm gonna reject this candidate, Completely irregardless of what the discourse was, because I want to see people fight for this person. Because the default should not be, we're gonna hire this person. The default should be, we're definitely not hiring this person.”
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