Get Hired Hack @ Columbia Startup Lab

​📋 Event Description

​Skip the resume pile. Get Hired Hack is a one-day, in-person hackathon at Columbia Startup Lab where NYC's fastest-growing startups bring real problems from their roadmaps, and you show them what working with you looks like.

​Founders who are hiring will be in the room, watching you build. Ship something great and your demo becomes your first commit.

​Problem Statement

​Startups don't hire resumes. They hire people who ship. But hiring still runs on LeetCode, keyword filters and 45-minute calls that tell a founder almost nothing about how you work.

​At Get Hired Hack, each hiring startup brings one real, scoped problem it would actually assign a new engineer. Pick a track, build against it, and demo it to the founder who wrote it. Founders get the best hiring signal there is: real work on their real problem. You get a shot at a role on proof of work, not pedigree.

​The Challenge Tracks

​Each track is a real problem from a hiring startup:

• ​TBD

​Expect problems across:

• ​AI agents and LLM-powered features

• ​Full-stack product work

• ​Infra, devtools and data pipelines

• ​Growth and internal tooling

​What to Expect

• ​Founders who are hiring pitch their problem at kickoff

• ​[~6] hours of focused building on real startup problems

• ​Teams of 4

• ​Demos to the founder whose problem you picked

• ​Lunch, coffee and a room full of people building NYC's next great companies

​Prizes

• ​Every track winner gets a fast-tracked final-round interview with that startup's founder

​Judges

• ​TBD

​Who Should Attend

• ​Engineers with real shipping experience (full stack, backend, AI/ML, infra)

• ​Senior engineers curious about joining an early-stage startup

• ​Builders who'd rather show their work than talk about it

• ​Engineers who want to be a startup's first or fifth hire, not its five-hundredth

​You don't need to be actively job hunting. Come build, meet founders and see what's out there.

​Sponsors

• ​NicrronNinoo - An AI research company. The complete stack for working AI.

​Hosts

• ​Somya Gupta - The face of NYC startup ecosystem.

• ​Matthew Pisinski - Fellow @ Columbia Startup Lab.

• ​Olivia Iarmak - Researcher | Meta Reality Labs.

​Venue

• ​Columbia Startup Lab: Columbia's home for alumni founders, a coworking space and community in SoHo.