The last fireside was Sept 30, and our lineup was cracked. Here's who took the stage, and every one of them is hiring.

Datadog is the cloud observability and security platform that engineering teams use to monitor everything they ship, from infrastructure and application performance to logs, security, and real user experience. Founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc and headquartered right here in NYC, it’s one of the city’s biggest homegrown tech success stories: public on the Nasdaq since 2019, now in the S&P 500, with roughly 8,000 employees and over $1B in quarterly revenue. It’s also deep in the AI wave, having just launched 100+ new capabilities at DASH 2026 and acquired Adaptive ML this summer. For a room full of engineers thinking about the jump from SWE to CTO, there’s not a more fitting host. Huge thanks to Datadog for opening up their HQ for the fireside.

Hiring: Engineering, product, GTM, and solutions, nearly all in NYC.

Engineering: Senior Software Engineer (Distributed Systems), Senior Software Engineer (Streaming Platform), Senior Software Engineer (AI Code Gen), Staff Software Engineer (Frontend), Staff Software Engineer (Logs Management), and Engineering Manager (Applied AI).

Product: Product Manager II (APM), Product Manager II (Agent Observability), Group Product Manager (Code Security), and Product Marketing Manager.

GTM: Enterprise Account Executive, Mid Market Account Executive, and SDR.

Solutions & Partnerships: Senior Sales Engineer, Senior Technology Partner Engineer, and Senior Technology Partner Manager.

Plus Summer 2027 Software Engineering Internships (NYC and Boston). Details here.

On Sept 30, The Shortlist NYC co-founder Ivor Stratford, who also founded Morpheus, moderated our “SWE → CTO” fireside chat at Datadog’s NYC HQ. He led a conversation with Ceena Modarres (Deepgram), Sesh Nalla (Datadog) and Mayada Gonimah (Thread AI) on what it actually takes to go from writing code to running an engineering org. Ivor spends his days talking to founders and building out the Shortlist talent pipeline, which made him the right person to push the panel past the usual answers and into the specifics!!

Ceena leads applied voice AI work at Deepgram, where she’s spent the last several years taking speech models from research into production for retail and enterprise customers. Based in Brooklyn, UMD grad. Deepgram is the voice AI infrastructure company behind speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and the Voice Agent API, now used by 1,300+ organizations. It hit unicorn status in January with a $130M Series C at a $1.3B valuation, passed $100M ARR in August, and just launched Flux, a conversation-native speech model. Remote-first, with roughly 100 roles open.

Hiring: Hiring: Engineering, research, product, and GTM, mostly US remote with a few NYC and SF seats. Engineering: Backend, Applied ML, ML Ops, and Forward Deployed Engineers (NYC). Research: Research Staff (Voice AI, LLMs) and Director of TTS Research. Product: Staff PMs, Senior PM, and Product Designers. GTM: Strategic AE (NYC), Corporate AE, SDR, Solutions Engineer, and Customer Success Engineer. Details here.

Mayada co-founded Thread AI in 2023 with CEO Angela McNeal after leading AI/ML product infrastructure for Palantir Foundry, where she architected real-time inference platforms and grew the team from 3 to 30+ engineers. Before Palantir she was a lead engineer at The New York Times, building the payments and e-commerce systems behind 10M+ digital subscriptions, and spent four years in infrastructure at Goldman Sachs. Williams College, economics and CS. Thread AI builds Lemma, an AI orchestration platform that lets enterprises and government agencies design, run, and govern AI-powered workflows and agents inside their existing stack. NYC-based, Series A, roughly $26M raised from investors including Index Ventures.

Hiring: Engineering, GTM, and ops, all in-person in NYC. Engineering: Software Engineers (Backend, Frontend, Infra, Security), Applied AI Engineer, Applied Data Scientist, Applied AI Designer, and Applied AI Strategist. GTM: Enterprise AE, BDR, and Product Marketing Lead. Ops: Business Operations Strategist and Technical Recruiter. Details here.

Sesh is VP of Engineering at Datadog, where he leads Cognitive Systems, the org building intelligence on top of Datadog’s data (Bits AI, anomaly detection, AI-assisted investigation). He’s been at Datadog since 2019, climbing from Director to Senior Director to VP, and before that spent a decade in engineering leadership at Ameriprise. He’s one of the loudest voices on how AI changes the SDLC: he spoke at Code with Claude in May on how 90% of Datadog engineers adopted AI coding tools in four months, and ran a DASH 2026 panel with the CEOs of Warp, Greptile, and OpenCode. Datadog is NYC’s biggest homegrown tech company: founded 2010, public since 2019, S&P 500, 8,100+ employees, HQ at 620 8th Ave.

Hiring: Engineering, product, GTM, and solutions, nearly all in NYC. Engineering: Senior and Staff Software Engineers (Distributed Systems, Streaming, Frontend, Logs, AI Code Gen) and Engineering Manager (Applied AI). Product: Product Managers (APM, Agent Observability, Code Security) and Product Marketing Manager. GTM: Enterprise AE, Mid Market AE, and SDR. Solutions: Senior Sales Engineer and Technology Partner Engineer/Manager. Plus Summer 2027 SWE internships. Details here.

The way people find startup jobs is broken in a specific way: the best roles get filled before they’re posted. A founder closes a round, texts three people they trust, and the job is gone. Meanwhile, thousands of ambitious operators are refreshing job boards, applying into the void, and competing on a resume for roles that were never really open.

The Shortlist exists to close that gap. Once a month, we put six breakout NYC founders in a room with a hundred people we’ve vetted and chosen on purpose. Founders say what they’re building and who they need. The people in the room are exactly who they’re looking for. No ATS, no cover letters, no waiting. The intro happens the same night.

That’s why we’re moving differently. We’re application-only on both sides, because curation is the product. We’d rather have 100 people who belong than 500 who don’t. We go deep on founders before they present, not after. And we treat the newsletter the way we treat the room: give people something useful enough that they’d be stupid not to open it, then show them who’s hiring.

NYC is having its moment. The founders who’ll define the next decade are already here, and most of them are still small enough that a single great hire changes everything. Our job is to be the place where those two sides find each other first.

If you want it tighter for a sidebar or “About” section, this is the three-sentence version:

The best startup roles are filled before they’re posted. The Shortlist puts six breakout NYC founders in a room with 100 people we’ve chosen on purpose, and the intros happen that night.

Curated on both sides, no job boards, no waiting. Be in the room. Come meet the founders yourself at the next showcase.