Amanda
Richardson

Stops Along the Way

The career before CoderPad reads like a tour of every growth stage a tech company can hit. At Snagajob (now Snag), she was SVP of Product and Marketing for a blue-collar job marketplace when mobile was still an afterthought. At Prezi - the Hungarian presentation platform that briefly threatened PowerPoint's monopoly - she helped scale the user base to over 50 million. At HotelTonight, she ran product and then took on data and strategy, driving conversion improvements of more than 30% and managing the relationships with Apple and Google as the app climbed the charts. HotelTonight got acquired by Airbnb in 2019.

Between HotelTonight and CoderPad came Rabbit - a social co-watching platform where friends could watch TV together online, backed by a16z and Bessemer. Richardson was CEO. The company was acquired by Kast in July 2019. She was in the CEO seat for roughly a year, long enough to run the full playbook - fundraising, product strategy, acquisition process - and short enough to leave with an education, not a legacy.

Then CoderPad called.

The Hiring Platform Inside the Hiring Machine

The problem CoderPad was built to solve is both obvious and remarkably persistent: technical interviews, for most of their history, have been theater. A candidate sits down and writes an algorithm on a whiteboard or in an environment they've never used, solving a puzzle they'd never encounter at work, while an interviewer watches. The signal-to-noise ratio on what this tells you about a candidate's actual job performance is... not great.

Richardson arrived with a thesis that realistic interviews produce better hires. The platform she inherited had strong traction in live coding interviews - engineers and candidates working through problems together in a shared environment. Under her leadership, that thesis got extended, funded, and operationalized at scale.

The Acquisition That Changed Everything

In October 2021, Richardson led the acquisition of CodinGame - a French company specializing in asynchronous technical assessments with a game-based approach to developer recruitment. The deal transformed CoderPad from a live coding interview tool into a full technical hiring platform: both synchronous and asynchronous, both interview and pre-screen, both US-centric and genuinely global.

She closed the deal during a pandemic, merged two teams operating in different time zones and different cultures, and integrated the products without detonating either of them. The result was a platform that now gives companies an end-to-end workflow for evaluating technical talent - from initial assessment to final round - under a single roof.

It also pushed CoderPad from a point solution into a category-defining company. When you're doing 3 million assessments a year across 160 countries, you're not a startup feature anymore. You're the standard.

On AI: The Tool You Should Be Testing For

Richardson has been unusually direct about where she stands on AI in technical hiring. Most companies spent 2023 and 2024 quietly panicking about candidates using ChatGPT to cheat their way through coding assessments. Richardson's position was the opposite: if a developer would use AI on the job - and they will - then why are you testing them without it?

"We encourage it," she has said of candidates using AI tools during CoderPad interviews. CoderPad integrated ChatGPT into its platform and positioned the capability as a feature, not a problem to be patched. The argument is methodologically sound: interview for the skills that matter at work, not the skills that mattered in 2015.

There's a line she draws clearly, though. "We never let AI make hiring decisions. That's for humans." The platform surfaces data. People decide.

The Gym Teacher Story

There's a formative moment Richardson has shared publicly that says a lot about how she operates. As a kid, she received a C in gym class. Rather than accept it, she went back to her teacher and asked why. The grade, it turned out, wasn't for athletic performance - it was for dress code violations. Her father had encouraged her to ask the uncomfortable question. She has been doing it ever since.

That instinct - go ask directly, don't assume the answer, get the real reason - runs through her career. She became CEO of Rabbit by asking for the role. She pivoted from Wall Street to product management by stating what she wanted and pursuing it. She closes deals and expands markets by refusing to accept that the current state of affairs is the only possible one.

Building While Profitable

Richardson runs CoderPad with what she calls financial prudence - she has described herself as "stingy" with resources. In a startup ecosystem that spent the 2010s celebrating growth at any cost, this is not the default setting. But it means CoderPad has grown to nearly 100 people while maintaining profitability - a combination that gives Richardson choices most CEOs don't have when the market turns.

She holds the title with that measured intensity: "The engineers are fine. They don't need you" - a philosophy that trusts technical teams, clears blockers, and resists the CEO instinct to centralize every decision. She also brings humor. Culture, for Richardson, is not a values document on a wall. It's who you hire, how you treat people when things go sideways, and whether you can laugh at your own mistakes.

Beyond the Office

Richardson serves as Board President of Thomas Edison Charter Academy in San Francisco, a public charter school, and sits on the Advisory Board of UVA's McIntire School of Commerce - the institution where her professional story started. She's spoken at SXSW, Women In Product, Mind the Product, and the Lean Startup Conference. She is a mother of two in San Francisco.

The through-line across all of it - the Wall Street start, the product management pivot, the string of tech companies, the CEO seat, the school board - is someone who decided early on to ask for what she wanted rather than wait for permission to want it. The technical hiring industry is one of the more useful places that instinct could land.