540+ senior engineering placements.

The Stack. The Driver.

The car is the stack: the most elite machine in sourcing. It surfaces the right engineers in hours, not weeks, reads the whole field, and ranks signal over noise. The driver is the recruiter: the most elite drivers in recruiting. The machine surfaces the field; people win the race. The handholding, the candidate and client service, the relationship, the persuasion, the close, the negotiation: every part of the work that demands elite understanding, representation, and business acumen lives with the driver, not the stack.

The work, as we see it.

A senior engineer is the most concentrated bet your company will make. Engineers only get one shot every four years.

It is a bet on a team, a thesis, and a window of time. A senior engineer joining at Series A is making a wager more concentrated than any investor's. The investor diversifies across a portfolio. The engineer puts four years and their reputation behind one company. The conviction has to be deeper, not shallower, than the investor's. Our job is to make sure that conviction is real before the offer is signed.

We don't start from zero. Every search begins inside an 83,000-engineer network we've spent fifteen years building. The preliminary conversations are already behind us.

Selected team buildouts

Rivian (pre-IPO automotive, software org build)

Built four of Rivian's core software divisions during the run to the largest IPO since Facebook. Partnered directly with the CEO. Placed the VP of Software Engineering, still leading the org, and the ML Director who built and led the company's machine learning strategy.

Unity Technologies (applied ML team scale-up)

Scaled Unity's machine learning team from one to thirty engineers. The group went on to create the first AI agents capable of playing video games at a high level, recognized by Forbes as the 5th Most Important Breakthrough in AI. Unity raised $400 million and IPO'd.

Mira Labs (pre-acquisition team build)

Helped build the early team and led talent at the executive level ahead of acquisition by Apple.

NEXT Trucking (growth-stage executive placement)

Placed the Chief Product Officer at a critical growth stage. The company went on to raise $150 million.

Google (high-volume technical hiring)

Achieved 300% of hiring targets across senior engineering recruiting.

The network

83,000+ engineers, sourced, indexed, and enriched in our own database, then deepened by an active LinkedIn relationship network we've built over fifteen years. Most of these are multi-year relationships built over years, which is why outreach starts warm and response rates run far higher than cold sourcing.

Companies represented

Google, Google DeepMind, SpaceX, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA, Databricks, Stripe, Airbnb, Netflix, Unity, Riot Games, Rivian, and hundreds of venture-backed startups.

Investors backing the companies we staff

Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake, BlackRock, SoftBank, Index Ventures, and others.

Strategic Advisory

For venture capital firms: portfolio talent strategy paired with proprietary deal-flow surface area. Talent and deal flow come from the same network. Every week we talk to senior engineers and technical leaders. Three categories of pipeline come through us: engineers within a quarter of starting something, stealth and seed-stage builds that are pre-product and pre-announce, and domain experts at inflection ready to spin out or join the right early team.

Leadership includes a partner at a venture capital fund who has deployed and managed over $800 million in committed capital across private equity and venture strategies, formerly a Managing Director at one of the largest financial institutions in the world.

Technology

OTP operates in the agentic era of recruiting. Four principles shape how we work: recruiting is no longer human-bottlenecked; the judgment work stays human; 72-hour speed is a byproduct of a real system, not a marketing claim; and the advantage compounds for firms that built early. We do not publish the stack.

Founder

Kyler Frisbee, Founder and Managing Partner. Has placed 540+ senior engineers at companies including Google, Rivian, and Mira (acquired by Apple). Fifteen years embedded in engineering organizations across Google, Rivian, Unity, and venture-backed startups in Seattle and San Francisco. 300% of hiring targets at Google. Four of Rivian's core software divisions built through to the largest IPO since Facebook.

In 2017, Danny Lange brought Kyler in as one of the first two members of Unity's machine learning team. That group went on to ship the first AI agents to play games at scale and to train autonomous vehicles in simulation.

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/techgentleman

Advisors

Optimal Tech Partners is advised by leaders who have operated at the scale and stakes our clients are aiming for.

Laszlo Bock. Former SVP of People Operations at Google. Led Google's people organization for eleven years, scaling the company from 6,000 to over 60,000 employees. Author of Work Rules!, the New York Times bestseller now taught at Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, and Berkeley. Co-founder of Humu (acquired by Perceptyx) and Gretel (acquired by NVIDIA). Senior Advisor at General Catalyst, where his portfolio carries a 60% unicorn rate.

Selden Frisbee. Partner, IR at Quiet Capital, the San Francisco investment firm whose portfolio includes Anthropic, OpenAI, Anduril, and other category-defining technology companies. Helped scale Quiet from $2B to $5B+ AUM. Brings an investor lens to engineering team formation, capital strategy, and the connective tissue between founders and the funds backing them.

Testimonials

Kyler supported my team in our growth in a space where we had some significant difficulties in finding the right skillsets as we had set an extremely high bar for candidates. Kyler really helped us discover and bring on board some very strong hires for our critical growing team. He was great with our candidates, internally with our engineering teams, and was consistently accountable in following through. I loved his passion and his accountability. It's been a pleasure!

Kyler approaches recruiting with a wonderful focus on ensuring candidates have a strong, positive experience throughout the process.

Kyler is probably one of the coolest guys I've worked with. That's not a reference only to his always interesting conversations or upbeat attitude. It's first and foremost a statement on how energetically he takes on taxing tasks and still manages to keep his cool on the process. His presence is always positive, as he takes to himself the responsibility of playing the important role of connecting people and creating an atmosphere of casual comfort — so important when handling the tasks in hand in his line of business.

Kyler is an energetic and dedicated recruiting partner. I've enjoyed working with him to help my team grow and find the right people to help us be successful. He is excited about technology and works to get a good knowledge of the work the teams are doing, so that he can help them find the right folks.

After working freelance for a talent agency for two years and being contacted by hundreds of technical recruiters, I can say that Kyler is the best recruiter I have met, been placed by, and worked with. He is genuinely interested in the outcome for the candidates and business as shown in his research of my goals, meeting me in person several times to confirm, encouragement during hiring, and following up during and after the hire.

Contact

For hiring inquiries: kyler@optimal.tech

For engineers and partnerships: partners@optimal.tech

Client Portal: https://app.optimal.tech