Why we hire engineers from Waterloo

When Nick and I started Rundoo, we did not set out to build an engineering team rooted in any single school. What has happened over time is that the overwhelming majority of our engineering hires have come from one specific pipeline: the co-op program at the University of Waterloo. This was not a deliberate plan from day one, but it has become something close to a strategy, and I want to explain why.

The Waterloo co-op program is unusual

Waterloo runs a particularly intense co-op program for its computer science and software engineering students, where they alternate four-month school terms with four-month full-time work terms beginning in their first year. By the time they graduate, most of them have completed five or six co-ops at five or six different companies, and the resumes we see often include a mix of large tech companies, small startups, infrastructure teams, fintechs, and ML labs, all stamped onto someone who technically still has not finished a degree.

That is a lot of professional reps for a student, and it shows.

The fifth and sixth co-ops are where it clicks

We have hired interns at every stage of the program, and we have noticed something consistent across the cohorts: there is a meaningful jump in capability between the earlier co-ops and the later ones. By the fifth or sixth co-op, the floor is high enough that an intern can come in, get ramped on our codebase and our domain, and begin contributing meaningful work within their term. We are still mentoring them and investing significant time in helping them succeed, just as we would for any new hire, and that part of the job remains very much our responsibility. The difference is that the runway is shorter, the learning curve flattens faster, and the ceiling is genuinely high.

A lot of that comes down to variety. By their fifth or sixth co-op, these students have seen multiple codebases, multiple cultures, multiple architectures, and multiple flavors of organizational dysfunction. They have a sense for what good engineering practice looks like, what to push back on, and how to ramp into an unfamiliar environment quickly, because they have done it four or five times already. That breadth is genuinely difficult to manufacture in any other way.

The point of the program is full-time conversion

I want to be clear that we are not running a short-term labor strategy here. The point of hiring fifth and sixth co-ops is to convert them into full-time engineers when they graduate, and that is the entire game. Every co-op term is, in effect, a four-month interview going both directions: we get to see how someone thinks, ships, communicates, and grows over a real product cycle, and they get to see whether the team and the mission are something they want to commit to. By the end of a term, both sides are working with much higher-quality information than any traditional interview loop could ever produce.

We have been very fortunate in the conversion outcomes so far, and the engineers who joined us full-time after a Waterloo co-op are now some of the most impactful contributors on the team.

We tried other paths

We did not arrive at this position casually. We have experimented with junior and senior year interns from traditional, non-co-op programs, and we have generally struggled to get the same outcomes within the same window. The floor was lower, the ramp took longer, and we found it harder to get on the same page within a single summer. Twelve weeks is a short amount of time, and when most of it gets spent ramping rather than shipping, the experience is frustrating for both the intern and the team.

I want to be careful with how I say this, because it is not a comment on the students themselves. The ceiling probably evens out over time. Students from non-co-op programs are not less intelligent and they are not less impressive on paper, and many of them go on to outstanding careers. What we have observed is that a non-co-op program, by structure, just gives students fewer at-bats. An undergrad with one or two summer internships has had less exposure to the variety of real engineering environments than someone halfway through a Waterloo co-op sequence, and that shows up in how quickly they can plug into a small, fast-moving team like ours. Both of those engineers might end up at the same place by year three of their career. The difference is mostly about where you can plug them in today, and at our stage, today matters quite a bit.

A contrarian moment to invest in early-career engineers

There is a broader thing happening in our industry that I want to address directly. A lot of companies right now are quietly deciding to skip the junior and mid-level pipeline almost entirely. The reasoning typically goes that AI tools give senior engineers enough leverage that you no longer need to hire and train the next generation, and that you can simply run a smaller, more experienced team and produce the same output for less.

We disagree, and we disagree philosophically.

We use AI tools heavily at Rundoo, and they have made our team meaningfully more productive across nearly every part of the engineering lifecycle. They have not, in our experience, eliminated the need to bring in early-career talent and develop them carefully. If anything, they have raised the bar for what a thoughtful junior engineer can accomplish in their first year, which strikes us as an excellent reason to invest in juniors rather than a reason to stop. The companies that quietly keep hiring and developing the next generation of engineers will, three or four years from now, have a depth of bench that the companies skipping this step simply will not, and we are confident that this is a strategy that pays off over time even if it costs us a little more attention today.

It is also a bet on people. We genuinely enjoy working with engineers who are early in their careers and watching them grow into senior contributors over multiple co-op terms and beyond. That part of the job is not incidental for us; it is most of the joy. Building software that supply stores depend on every day is the mission. Building a team where talented people can get great at their craft is most of the fun along the way.

Where this leaves us

If you are a Waterloo co-op reading this and wondering whether to apply for a fifth or sixth term at Rundoo, please do. We will work hard to make your term meaningful, and if it goes well on both sides, we will make every effort to bring you back full-time after graduation.

If you are an early-career engineer from somewhere else, this is not a rejection. We hire from everywhere, and we always will. We just wanted to be honest about where the center of gravity has ended up, and why.

And if you happen to be another engineering leader who is quietly cutting the early-career pipeline because the spreadsheet looks better that way, I would gently encourage you to reconsider. We are confident this is one of the best long-term decisions we will look back on, even if it costs us a little focus in the short term.