Kyla Salac: Job Search Tips From a Meta Recruiter
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Kyla Salac is a senior technical recruiter with 13 years of experience, including hiring for Meta on the AI and ML team, and now focuses her work at an AI startup
“I started off in agency recruiting and then had my own recruiting company for three years. After that, I joined a Series A startup and got to see all phases of growth through to Series D, especially on the engineering side.”
“In 2021 I joined Meta, supporting the ML and AI software engineering team, strictly hiring IC7s or senior staff-level engineers.”
“I'm also working for an AI startup, hiring engineers in ML Ops, platform infrastructure, and ML.”
“Success always comes down to being prepared,” says Kyla. This is true of both the golden era of tech hiring and today’s competitive market.
But Kyla explains that often candidates don’t prepare in the right ways, and that showing an interest in the company and its team is key to standing out from the crowd.
“Do research on the company, trust me. I've seen many candidates come in and just go through the interview. But when the recruiter or hiring manager asks them what got them interested in the company, most of the time they give a very generic, surface-level answer.”
Kyla says candidates must spend at least one hour just researching the company, and her three key pieces of advice is to:
“These things really help you stand out as an applicant. It shows that you've done your research and enables you to ask better questions of the hiring manager. Because the more thoughtful questions that you have the better.”
During the interview, show confidence. Candidates get nervous, but overcoming that just comes down to practicing, being able to go into depth in your answers, and being able to provide examples of what you've done in the past.
But the most important thing in interviews is being able to showcase how something you have built has had a direct impact on a business or end users.
Kyla explains that interviewers want to hear you talk in detail about what you've done as an engineer.
“Candidates often say “we” instead of “I” when talking about past projects they have contributed to. Showcase what you have done. Make it about how you contributed to your team,” she says.
Clearly communicating your full potential and demonstrating your desire to reach it matters to employers.
“At Meta during behavioral interviews we always ask candidates how they've been able to grow in their careers,” Kyla says. “You must show how you've been able to collaborate cross-functionally with other teams.
Kyla explains that what Meta and other top-tier tech companies want candidates to do here is to clearly
portray that influence amongst those other teams that they are collaborating with. Additionally, how you explain the ways in which you deal with tension is key.
“There might be certain times where you don’t agree with another teammate or manager. How you handled that conflict and what you did to learn from that lesson is important to explain to hiring teams.”
“These questions often help us see how candidates think, what their thought process is, and their ability to want to improve and get better. It also kind of shows your level of maturity,” Kyla says.
A growth mindset is a phrase often used by software engineers, but many people have different interpretations of what it actually means on the job.
At Meta, Kyla says, “it’s your ability to want to achieve more things and reach the next level. You need to have the right mindset and mentality to do that. With the job market so competitive, we want engineers who have that desire and ability to be proactive, to take ownership of their work.”
Whether you're working at a big company or a startup, having strong initiative and drive helps you stand out. In your career, as you're going through promotions, growth is thinking about how you could take on a project for your team and help your manager.
AI and ML’s monumental effect has exposed the dearth of AI-skilled software engineers. Companies now want engineers with AI and ML capacities.
A GitHub Copilot study with Arxiv found that software engineers using Copilot completed the engineering task 55.8% faster than the control group, while a trial on Google engineers found those using AI spent 21% less time completing complex tasks.
“For example, at the startup I'm working with, even though we're hiring for a staff level engineer, the role / the candidate was expected to code. That's one trend that I've been seeing in a lot of companies, they want more breadth. So an IC4 would be producing more work than in the past,” with the help of AI.
With AI and ML fields expanding rapidly, different branches are emerging within the field. Kyla says that those looking to work in AI and ML need to be clear about that from the beginning.
“If there's a specialty that you’re interested in, hone in on that, portray it on your resume. If you're more focused on the front end, you could think about how these LLMs would apply to UX. If you're focused on the back end, think about how you could uplevel your skills or contribute your skills to more of the ML infrastructure side.”
“Hiring managers always ask candidates how they use AI day to day to be more productive as a software engineer.
“I encourage candidates to play around with that because sometimes even with AI, it'll help when it comes down to debugging or doing unit tests or even putting up documentation, which normally would take a little bit of a longer time. Showcase how AI has helped you as a software engineer.”
Companies large and small are primarily interested in engineers with an understanding of ML infrastructure and ML Ops, Kyla says.
“These are the platforms that are being used to help train these models, deploy them, and then monitor them in production, allowing the data science team or the researchers to be able to use these models daily.
“We also need more folks on the research side because they are putting these ML models together and doing the testing and research.”
If you do have a strong platform background or infrastructure background, you could definitely get into more of the ML Ops side or ML opsides. But core software engineering skills will always be needed.
In 2025’s competitive market, landing a software engineering job requires more than technical skills.
As Kyla notes, initiative and drive are what set candidates apart, whether at a startup or a FAANG company.
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