Robert Chondro is Co-Founder and CEO of Saffron AI, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-native technical assessments that help companies identify elite software engineers in the age of AI-assisted coding.

Robert studied Mathematics and Computer Science at MIT and gained experience at elite quantitative finance firm Jane Street, alongside co-founders Jerry Yao and Kazuma Choji, whom he met in high school.

Robert and his co-founders built Saffron from a firsthand insight: as CS students recruiting for SWE roles, they witnessed how rapidly AI tools transformed real-world coding workflows while hiring processes remained stagnant.

Saffron is backed by Y Combinator (P26) and Afore Capital, and gives candidates a real codebase with full AI tooling access, capturing every prompt, diff, and decision for automatic scoring.

Saffron addresses a critical gap in technical hiring by providing structured metrics on how candidates actually build with AI, helping companies avoid costly mis-hires and identify engineers who can leverage AI to be 10x more productive.