Most recruiting firms try to serve every industry. We picked one — robotics and AI — and rebuilt the entire firm around it. The candidate networks, the screens, the comp benchmarks, the geographic footprint. All specialist, all the time.
Flywheel started as a generalist recruiting firm. We worked across software, finance, sales, ops — the standard mix. And we were good at it.
But every quarter the same pattern emerged. Our best work, the placements that compounded into long-term partnerships, came from a specific corner of our book: robotics and AI startups. The engineers were harder to find. The hiring panels were sharper. The comp was non-standard. The mission was real.
We doubled down. Then we tripled down. Today, every recruiter on our specialist desk works exclusively in robotics, autonomy, and applied AI — and our generalist book is closed to new clients.
The bet is simple: in a market this technical, depth wins.
These aren't aspirations. They're the filters we use to decide what work to take, who to hire onto our team, and how to run an engagement.
If a role isn't robotics, autonomy, or applied AI, we refer it out. We don't dilute the desk to chase a fee. The whole point of a specialist firm is the network compounding effect — and that effect breaks the moment we generalize.
Our recruiters can read a JD, ask a follow-up question, and have an actual conversation about the work. Engineers can tell within thirty seconds whether they're talking to someone who gets it. We make sure the answer is yes.
We aim to be the recruiting team you'd build if you had infinite time. That means showing up to your hiring meetings, owning the funnel metrics, and caring whether the placement stays — not just whether they sign.
The work moves between Austin, Tokyo, and Manila in real time. A US client gets bilingual access to Japanese industrial robotics talent and an offshore data ops bench at 50–70% cost — without managing three vendors.
We picked our locations on purpose. Each one corresponds to a real talent supply problem our clients are trying to solve.
Texas robotics, Houston aerospace, and a national reach into the Bay, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. Where most of our retained searches and US-side embedded RPO engagements run.
The world's deepest industrial robotics pool — Sony, Honda, Fanuc, Preferred Networks, and the next generation of Japanese deep-tech founders. Bilingual recruiting in both directions.
Engineering-quality offshore talent for ML eval, data infra, MLOps, annotation, and back-office. We hire, train, and retain — with the same screening rigor as our US desk.
We work with companies from pre-seed humanoid startups to public industrial robotics primes. The size of the team matters less than what you're trying to build.