How Bramble hired their founding engineer in seven weeks on Marlowe's SourceDeck

We sat down with Theo Brandt, founder of Bramble — the AI teammate that triages incoming bugs so an engineering team never has to open the queue first thing on a Monday. Theo told us how he used SourceDeck to staff up while Bramble was still four people in a rented room.

Bramble is an AI engineer that helps teams ship, maintain and support software. Like a colleague who has read every commit, Bramble uses an understanding of the codebase and its history to answer undocumented questions, triage customer-facing bugs, and turn support threads into filed issues.

“Engineering first” hiring

When he started Bramble, Theo knew he wanted a company with a serious engineering culture from day one. Having been a founding engineer twice before, he explained: “I knew painfully well what kind of person I needed, and how few of them there are.”

A founding engineer has to move across the whole stack, but also has to sit with customers, read their frustration correctly, and turn it into product direction. Very few résumés carry any signal about the second half of that job.

It is possible, but wildly time-consuming, to identify those traits from a profile page and a list of past employers. Theo started where most founders start — referrals from his own network — and hit the ceiling quickly.

“After a certain point that network was exhausted,” Theo said. Most of the people he reached through second-degree referrals were either starting their own thing or comfortable in a stable job at a big company.

He tried a third-party contingency recruiter next, but quickly found that he wanted more control and more visibility over the process. He knew what he was looking for in a candidate; he simply did not have the hours or the tooling to go find them.

Finding SourceDeck

As the founder of an AI company, Theo wanted a recruiting product built the way he builds: leaning on models for the operational grind, and on people for judgement. He first came across SourceDeck in a newsletter, and the pitch landed.

What sold him was how little the tool asked him to change. SourceDeck plugged into the chat tool his team already lived in, so candidates surfaced in the same place as everything else. It also let him screen on the criteria he actually cared about — shipping experience inside small engineering teams, and time spent close to customers.

A different kind of peace of mind

SourceDeck let Theo evaluate a real pool of candidates within weeks, adjusting the search parameters as he learned. He had more control and a better interface than legacy network searches gave him, and he could watch how each criterion changed the size of the pool — which made it obvious which requirements were non-negotiable and which were wishful.

He also liked how little ceremony the workflow required: approve or reject, one candidate at a time, which he described as suspiciously close to Bramble's own mission of taking the admin out of an engineer's day.

Compared with the manual searching he had been doing, the difference was mostly in cycle time. Theo could assess whether a candidate met the bar in a matter of days rather than weeks, and adjust the brief while the search was still running. For a founder who was also the hiring manager, the interviewer and the closer, that compounding saved real weeks.

As an engineer, he also appreciated knowing exactly what the pool looked like at each turn of the dial. Setting expectations early meant he never had to reopen a decision halfway through a week of interviews.

Staying on track while hiring

Like most first-time founders, Theo was wearing every hat at once while the search ran — support, sales, and the product roadmap all still had his name on them. Hiring is the work that quietly slips first when everything is urgent.

Thanks to the chat integration and a pipeline he could actually count, Theo stayed on track with hiring while Bramble kept shipping.