How Specific Labs hired its founding data team in under 1.5 months

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Case Study

How Specific Labs hired its founding data team in under 4 weeks

AI labs need training data built from real engineering work, and Specific Labs makes it. This summer, as the labs came calling, the company had to hire fast. Here’s how Contrario helped them get there.

Arya Marwaha

Co-Founder & CEO

Oct 27, 2026

2

critical hires through Contrario

<4 weeks

to fill both

9 days

to Hire an RL Engineer

AI coding agents ace public benchmarks. Put them on a real company's codebase and they struggle. Specific Labs is built on that gap: it turns real engineering work into the training data AI labs need to close it. This summer, as the labs came calling, the company needed two hard-to-find hires fast: an RL engineer who had already built coding RL environments and shipped agents to production, and a founding Strategic Projects Lead to run those lab contracts.

Anish Rudra

Member of Technical Staff

Rishi Garg

Member of Technical Staff

How we did it

RL Engineer: 9 days to the right candidate. Plenty of engineers talk about reinforcement learning. Few have built RL environments for a living and shipped agents to production. Specific Labs needed both, remote from Latin America or India. Rishi Garg was already on Contrario: he had first come in for a different role. When the RL search opened, ReAgent, Contrario's newest AI tool, matched him to the new brief. Rishi had built evaluation tools for a frontier AI lab and agents that run long, multi-step tasks. Neil Kanakia got him in front of the team nine days after the role went live, and he was hired in about five weeks.

Founding Strategic Projects Lead: a rare profile. This role meant convincing companies to sell their data, then turning it into datasets for AI labs, in person in San Francisco 5.5 days a week. Few people have done both the deal-making and the delivery. Nur Haque found Anish Rudra, former chief of staff at Metis, an applied AI lab later acquired by DoorDash. He went from intro to hired in about three and a half weeks and has since moved into a Member of Technical Staff role.

The impact

Across five roles, recruiters on Contrario's network have submitted 159 candidates. Contrario's review screened out about a third before they reached the team, and of the four candidates who made it to the final round, three were hired. Both Anish and Rishi are still on the team, building the data operation Specific Labs delivers to frontier labs.

What we learned

Shipped work beats keywords. We screened every RL candidate for agents in production, not buzzwords on a résumé. A third didn't make the cut, so Specific Labs only met the ones who did.

Speed comes from the network you've already built. ReAgent matched Rishi from a past search, and he was in front of the team in 9 days.

Every search makes the next one faster. Each role we fill teaches us more about what great looks like. Specific Labs' next three hires start from everything we learned on these two.

What's next

Specific Labs keeps hiring through Contrario as the seed-stage company scales its data team. It's now hiring a founding RL engineer, a founding software engineer and three more Strategic Projects Leads. On the new RL role, ReAgent surfaced 18 matches from people already on the platform, and the team flagged four to meet within minutes.

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