The Junior Engineer Isn’t Needed Anymore: Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree

The junior engineer used to be the safe first hire. Cloë Stanbridge says AI just made that job disappear, and that’s only the start of what’s rewriting tech hiring right now.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Cloë Stanbridge, Talent Lead at Airtree, one of Australia’s most active venture capital firms. Cloë spends her days helping early-stage founders make their first engineering hires and helping later-stage companies scale their teams. They get into what actually makes a founder an “outlier” worth backing, why some founders eventually have to admit they’ve become the bottleneck in their own company, why the traditional junior engineer role is disappearing, and how Airtree’s new Frontiers program is drawing hundreds of applications from engineers ready to go out on their own.

It’s a hiring-trenches conversation full of specific, hard-won detail: the real numbers behind scaling a team from 60 to 350 people, why some recruiters place better talent because they simply know the team better, the AI tools on both sides of the hiring desk, and the line that sums up what’s actually scarce in tech right now — everyone can build, not everyone can sell.

About the guest

Cloë Stanbridge is Talent Lead at Airtree, where she partners with the firm’s portfolio to connect founders with top talent, build scalable hiring processes and develop playbooks that support sustainable growth. Before Airtree she spent over four years at The Lab17, embedding inside scaling companies including Linktree and Immutable, and led talent through a hypergrowth stretch at SafetyCulture, taking the engineering team from around 60 people to 350 in two years.

About the show

Building Tech Teams is hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent, and produced by Day One®, the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures’ Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI.