Built by engineers who've spent years on the other side of the hiring table.
We founded Fonzi in 2025 after running hiring processes that kept producing the same frustration: great stack match, wrong team fit, early departure.
The problem became obvious after the fortieth hire.
Brett ran technical hiring at several software companies over the course of a decade. After engineering-managing his way through 40+ hires, some excellent, some costly, a pattern emerged: the hires that didn't work out almost never failed on technical competence. They failed because their working style clashed with the team's, or because their career expectations didn't fit how the team operated.
Every recruiter and every ATS they used was optimized to filter on stack keywords. None of them had a model for working style, communication pace, or team culture alignment. That gap between "technically qualified" and "actually thrives here" was the company's problem to solve after the hire, always expensively, usually too late.
Fonzi started as a question: what if the matching system understood both dimensions from the beginning? Marcus brought the ML and recommendation-systems background to build it. Priya brought the product knowledge to make it usable in a real hiring workflow. We launched our first early-access cohort in October 2025 with 8 engineering teams and used what we learned to build what exists today.
Three people who've all been on the wrong side of a bad hire.
Engineering leadership and product strategy background. Spent years running technical hiring processes at software companies, managing 40+ engineering hires across multiple teams. Founded Fonzi after recognizing that stack screening alone consistently failed to predict who would thrive on a specific team.
Applied ML and recommendation systems engineer with 7+ years building candidate-matching pipelines for developer platforms. Deep background in embedding-based retrieval and behavioral signal modeling. Leads Fonzi's matching engine architecture and engineering team.
5 years in recruiting operations at technical companies. Background in product management and hiring funnel optimization. Expert in the gap between ATS metrics and actual team-fit outcomes. Leads Fonzi's product direction and hiring manager experience.
What we think good hiring looks like.
Three right candidates beats 200 maybes.
We measure success by how quickly a hiring manager can get to an interview with confidence, not by how many profiles we surface. Volume is not a product value.
We show mismatches, not just matches.
Fonzi tells you why a candidate scores 81 instead of 94. The reasoning for a lower score is often more useful than the reasoning for a high one.
Engineers are not inventory.
We built the engineer side of Fonzi to give candidates genuine agency: control what's visible, opt out completely, see which teams matched and why. Recruiting should work for both sides.
Work with us.
Hiring managers: try your first three roles free. Engineers: build your profile and let the matches come to you.