Insights on Building AI Teams — Heath Black, SignalFire

Original: Insights on Building AI Teams — Heath Black, SignalFire

6.4K views · Apr 15, 2025 · 20:29 min · Watch on YouTube ↗

Takeaway

Hire AI talent on body-of-work in the right geographies and watch retention/funding data — credentials and Twitter narratives are misleading.

Summary

SignalFire's Beacon platform tracks 650M employees and 80M companies to surface AI hiring trends; AI hiring is dramatically de-credentialing — engineers from top schools dropped 27%→15%, PhDs 16%→7% (2015→2023).
Talent has concentrated in nine 'AI League' companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, etc.); Anthropic leads retention at 66% 4-year, perplexity around 43%; OpenAI has positive net flow from DeepMind, Cohere is net-negative.
San Francisco still hosts 35% of AI engineers (vs 22% Seattle, 10% NYC) and 38% of early-stage AI funding — Twitter narratives of SF dying are wrong per the data.
Gen Z churns at 27% annually vs Gen X half that — generational behavior changes recruiting timing.
Practical takeaway: drop PhD requirements, weight body-of-work over degree, watch capital flow as a leading indicator of talent flow.

hiringai-talentsignalfire

Original description

Market trends and people data. In a world with inflating salaries, it's more important now than ever to ensure you're using the proper filtering, timing, and narrative to find and hire the best possible engineering teams in the new AI era. In this talk, we'll share and discuss data sourced from SignalFire’s Beacon AI platform. Whether building a team or expanding one, we'll examine the information and processes we use to give our portfolio companies an edge, and a framework for setting themselves apart from the competition.

Recorded live at the Leadership Track Session Day from the AI Engineer Summit 2025 in New York. Learn more at https://ai.engineer and purchase tickets to our next event, the AI Engineer World's Fair, in SF June 3 - 5 here: https://ti.to/software-3/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025

About Heath

Heath Black joined Signalfire as Head of Product in 2021 to lead Beacon Talent and other machine-learning initiatives that help make our portfolio companies' lives better.

Before joining SignalFire, Heath was a senior product manager at Facebook (2017-2021), where he worked in the Facebook Reality Labs organization on various machine learning products for the Facebook + Rayban smart glasses collaboration. Before joining Facebook, Heath worked at several startups across Seed to Series A– Appstores, Chirpify, and Imzy. He also worked at Reddit from 2014-16, where he focused on building out new business lines to monetize the site. His favorite product at Reddit was the subscription box he worked on for cat owners. The box people received could be refolded into a tiny cat house.

Heath received a B.A. from Oklahoma Wesleyan University, where he studied English, with history and communications minors. He received his M.A. from DePaul University in English with a focus on Modern Irish Literature. He's a published poet, avid golfer, bookworm, NBA enthusiast, and father of two rambunctious boys.