Saad El Gharbaoui

I'm Saad. I graduated from USC in Computer Science and Business Administration, interned at Google and at Amazon twice, and got recruited into quant. I turned quant down because optimizing someone else's system wasn't the work I wanted. Instead I went all in on startups with real money behind them: Doublespeed, backed by a16z, and Clera, backed by 1984 Ventures with a $3M pre-seed, plus a few others. Today I'm building my own startup in stealth, and it's growing quickly. Almost all of my recent work is AI. I've built with it at a level most teams haven't reached yet and led engineers doing the same: designing the systems agents plug into, deciding what a model should never be trusted with, writing the evals that catch a regression before a customer does, and knowing which calls still need a human. That's a different skill from writing code, and it's the one companies are hiring for right now. I can help you with: - Landing big tech internships and new grad offers (I've been through Google and Amazon recruiting multiple times) - Quant recruiting, and deciding whether it's actually the right path for you - Breaking into startups: finding the good ones, reaching founders, and judging whether a company is real - Building an AI engineering career and a portfolio that proves you can do the work - Technical interviews: coding, system design, and the new AI-focused rounds I'm 22, so I was in your seat very recently. You'll get advice from someone who just ran the playbook in today's market, not five years ago.