How AfterQuery doubled its internal team in three months using Wrangle

As AI models improve, the bounding constraint has increasingly become data. AfterQuery has become YC’s fastest unicorn, selling these bespoke RL environments to frontier labs, facilitating the rapid advancements we’re seeing today.

“As long as the models are improving, they need data.” - Alec Zhou, Founding Talent Lead at AfterQuery

This opportunity has translated into extraordinary growth. Between June and September, AfterQuery doubled their headcount, from 40-45 full-time employees to 90. During the same period, the company is rumored to be fundraising at a $3.2 billion valuation.

These numbers describe AfterQuery’s internal team, the top-of-class engineers and operators working directly with top labs to build the datasets and RL environments necessary to push the frontier. Recruiting for that team means competing for exceptional people, including candidates fielding opportunities from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

For Alec, keeping up required building an internal recruiting process that can consistently find strong candidates, reach them directly, and reduce its dependence on expensive agencies.

Since June, Wrangle has facilitated this operation.

When Alec was initially developing the talent function, external recruiting partners and agencies helped supplement the sourcing capacity he didn’t yet have internally. As he assembled his own team, he brought more of that work in-house.

“I eventually built a team around me and brought sourcing and outreach internal.”

Today, Alec’s team uses Wrangle for their sourcing and outbound. Across their work, they have built collections containing thousands of candidates, spanning roles such as security engineering, software engineering, platform engineering, and infrastructure.

For already talent-dense teams like AQ, the most valuable sourcing vector is already internal, living within its employees’ networks. Wrangle allows Alec to invite engineers, sync their networks, source in the same way he would over our broader dataset, and directly request warm introductions.

Alec believes exceptional engineers often have less obvious profiles.

He looks for people whose ability, ambition, and work tell a stronger story than their school or internship history.

“Take the shots with unsexy profiles on LinkedIn.”

According to him, roughly 30–40% of AfterQuery’s engineering team came from schools outside its usual targets, often with little or no internship experience. Hackathons, friends, and warm network intros helped the company discover those people.

Market mapping is the other major part of Alec’s workflow.

“For any early talent team, it is very essential to map out the tier-one companies with the best engineers.”

His team builds candidate pools from these companies, and then queries and reaches out to the best candidates as roles open up in a targeted way. Alongside employee networks, this gives AfterQuery multiple ways to discover talent and maintain relationships as hiring needs change.

“I definitely have market mapped almost every single tier-one company that’s out there with Wrangle.”

The ability to do this work internally also changes the economics of recruiting.

Recruiting agencies typically charge 25–30% of a hire’s first-year salary. For AQ’s specialized, high-paying engineering roles, a single hire costs about $50,000–$60,000 in agency fees.

“I am saving anywhere between 50 to 60 thousand dollars per hire.”

Thus, filling 40 roles exclusively through agencies would imply $2 million–$2.4 million in placement fees, which have been largely reduced over the last few months using Wrangle. Alec estimates he has saved mid 6 figures in the last 3 months due to increased internal hiring efficiency.

To name a specific example, for a security engineering search, Alec used Wrangle’s market mapping feature to identify engineers with relevant startup experience, rather than commissioning a retained search, which he said could involve $10,000–$20,000 in retainers, with additional fees on a successful hire.

Together, network sourcing, market mapping, and outreach help the team handle more recruiting work internally before turning to external partners.

“Definitely saving a lot of money, saving a lot of time.”

Alec also sees value in having those capabilities within one platform.

His team uses Wrangle for sourcing and outreach, with sequencing and analytics supporting the same workflow.

That reduces the need to assemble and manage a separate tool for every step, and retains context across an entire hiring workflow.

“This is definitely the tool to use compared to buying a bunch of other ones and trying to manage all those tools at once.”

As AfterQuery’s recruiting operation has grown, Alec has worked directly with Wrangle’s team on how the product should evolve, particularly around automation, transparency, and analytics.

He recalls describing a feature change to John one evening and seeing it shipped by the early hours of the following morning.

“By 2–3 a.m. the next morning, it was done and shipped out.”

For a talent leader working all hours of the day, and supporting a company that doubled its internal headcount in three months, this level of responsiveness is how Alec operates, and how he expects his partners to operate as well.

“That is the speed that you want to ship at.”

Alec emphasizes Wrangle’s obsession with building tools recruiters love and live in for many hours each day. Having direct access to the engineers building the product lets him help shape the exact feature set his team needs.

“This team wants to build the tool that recruiters actually need.”