How Windsurf hired every Forward Deployed Engineer with Paraform
Windsurf is building AI-powered developer tools that redefine what teams can accomplish. In just over a year, they’ve grown from a founding team to 200+ employees, raised $150M (General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks), and launched flagship products like the Windsurf Editor.
With support for 40+ IDEs and a proprietary inference stack, Windsurf has quickly become a leader in the AI coding assistant space.
But unlike most copilots, Windsurf is built for the enterprise - serving companies like VMware, JP Morgan Chase, and Cisco. Each deployment requires deep integration with the customer’s codebase - work led by a uniquely demanding role: Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs).
FDEs combine the technical depth of an engineer with the polish to navigate high stakes customer facing environments. They’re rare. And hiring even one is slow, expensive, and hard to get right.
To meet demand, Windsurf needed to scale a team of FDEs across Mountain View, Austin, and London - quick. Traditional recruiting wasn’t delivering quality results fast enough. So they turned to Paraform.
Alex Laubscher, one of Windsurf’s first FDEs and now the hiring lead, turned to Paraform - and used it to build a 15+ person team now responsible for $50–100M in revenue. He sees Paraform as the recruiting engine unlocking Windsurf’s next phase of growth.
From firefighting to throughput: Windsurf’s FDE hiring crunch
By the time Alex, one of Windsurf’s first FDEs, started hiring for his own team, the gap between need and bandwidth was growing fast.
“We were hiring AEs at a pace where I could not keep up the FDE function. That leads to FDEs running more deals than they should be, at lower quality than they should be.”
The consequences were piling up. Overextended teammates, declining deal quality, and stalled headcount planning. Alex had experienced this kind of pressure firsthand.
“When I joined as the first deployed engineer, I covered every deal in the company. I know what that does to a human - and it’s not great things.”
Same cost, 10x top-of-funnel
Windsurf wasn’t lacking recruiters - they had both internal and external support. But the pipelines weren’t moving.
“Their pipelines dried up pretty fast. The internal team was focused on engineering. So I was just in a place where I didn’t have enough throughput to make good hires.”
That’s when he turned to Paraform. It wasn’t a hard sell.
“It’s the same price we’d pay any other recruiter...and with Paraform, we get way more throughput and better candidates”
“It solved my throughput problem”
Once the role was live, the results came fast.
“People were just seeing me in a meeting room by myself. It became my new office because I was taking interviews all day.”
Even though the role was niche, the volume was there - and once the recruiters calibrated, quality caught up too.
“The initial throughput was wild.”
7 high impact hires. All on Paraform.
“We made every hire with Paraform”
In just a few months, Alex made seven key hires through Paraform - including bets on new kinds of candidates Windsurf hadn’t considered before.
“What Eashan and Alex proved to us was that we could find exceptional people that could do this role that were new grads. We hadn’t taken that risk before.”
Another standout hire, Christina, came from a totally different persona - a PM at a large company.
“We started taking more risks on candidates with different backgrounds, and it worked,” Alex said. “Since then we’ve hired others from that profile too.”
The influx of qualified candidates allowed Alex to broaden what success looked like, experiment more freely, and drive the business forward.
“Because the candidates were just coming, I took more chances - and it helped me prove out more ICPs (Ideal Candidate Profiles) for the role.”
Making the case to skeptics
There’s always some hesitation when it comes to external recruiters - especially in high-bar environments. Will outsourcing negatively affect quality of candidates? Will they waste our time? Are candidates going to be up to our talent bar?
“Sales leadership doesn’t believe external recruiters can ever give them good profiles. They think good candidates only come from their network.”
But from Alex’s perspective, it doesn’t take much to make the platform worth it.
“It takes one hire to make it worth it. That’s what I always tell people.”
7 hires later, the conversation has shifted from “Is this worth it?” to “How many more teams can we support with this model?”
Paraform as a recruiting philosophy
Beyond the hires themselves, Paraform shifted how Alex approached recruiting entirely. When he had fewer candidates from traditional recruiters, he had to give extremely narrow instructions. With Paraform, he had the options and the ability zoom out and focus on traits that mattered more.
“When you're constrained on recruiter throughput, you have to say: ‘find me exactly this.’ With Paraform, I didn’t have to do that. I could just say, ‘find me ambitious technical people’”
That mindset shift is spreading across the company. Windsurf’s head of recruiting is now rolling Paraform out to the engineering org. Within the past week, Windsurf has partnered with Paraform to open multiple engineering and ML Research roles.
“Jeff [Head of Business] asked me, ‘Why are we not doing this with engineering?’ I was like, good question.”
Alex’s view is crystal clear:
“Paraform is the core engine that will be driving our recruiting.”
Onto the future
Windsurf didn’t compromise. They didn’t slow down. And they didn’t settle for “good enough”.
With Paraform, they made seven high-impact hires for mission-critical, hard-to-fill roles, in just a few months, across three geographies, through one platform. And there’s still more to come.
Those FDEs are now driving more than $100M in ARR. And Windsurf is already expanding its use of Paraform across net-new engineering and ML roles.
The bet paid off. Now they’re doubling down.
If you’re building high-velocity, business-critical teams and your recruiting model can’t keep up Windsurf’s story is proof that you don’t need to lower the bar to move fast.
You just need a better engine.
Start your search today.
Speak with our team to learn more about how Paraform can help you fill your difficult positions