Why we bought a recruiting firm

Last week, OpenAI and Anthropic both announced deployment companies. Google is scaling forward deployed engineering hiring. The pattern is unmistakable: the labs and hyperscalers have figured out that the biggest constraint on enterprise AI adoption isn’t the models. It’s the people who can put them to work inside enterprises.

We’ve been operating against this thesis since 2019. What’s changed is the scale of the opportunity in front of us.

To meet this moment, we knew we had to do something more drastic than just hire faster. We had to rethink how we build our team entirely.

So we acquired our recruiting partner, Candor.

From the beginning, working with Candor was different. They understood what made Tribe special and knew exactly how to position it to a new class of workers — forward deployed engineers.

Kelsey, Candor’s founder, is joining Tribe as Head of Talent & Staffing. She approached recruiting the way we approach AI engagements: fast, accountable to outcomes, willing to rebuild a function from first principles when the old way wasn’t working. We share an ethos of building for horsepower over pedigree. The Candor team ranges from biotech PhDs to operators who built some of Europe’s fastest-growing startups. Every one of them is exactly the kind of person we want at Tribe. The fit was natural, and at some point it stopped making sense to collaborate from the outside.

Which brings us to the most exciting news: Tribe now has a Lisbon office.

We’ve doubled the Tribe team since January and now have more recruiters than salespeople. The opportunity in front of us is bigger than even we imagined, and we’re building the team to match it.

And we’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you — we’re hiring!