Where infrastructure engineers
come to build & connect.
TrustIn is more than search. It's a community built around the people who keep the world's systems running — engineers, founders, and operators who care deeply about the craft.
Specialist search.
Done properly.
Marcus Gardiner-Hill worked for 5 years at a VC-backed recruitment startup in London before founding TrustIn with two initial founding retained clients. He provides specialist search at the Senior to Staff level — placing hands-on technical leaders, early Engineering Managers, and CTOs at startups, scale-ups, research labs, and hedge funds within software infrastructure.
He focuses on taking Seed to Series B companies through the talent acquisition journey — from hiring their Founding Engineers to building out their Software Infrastructure to massive scale pre-IPO.
Away from work, Marcus is an athlete (Water Polo and Basketball) and an adventurer — having cycled from Dublin to the Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng, China.
Marcus Gardiner-Hill
Founder · TrustIn · London
I have run community events from conferences to meetups and online roundtables, sat on conference panels, completed MIT's Introduction to Computer Science and Python Programming on their Open Education platform, and spent a lot of time just talking to engineers — to genuinely understand their world.
When you work with TrustIn, you're working with me. I run every search personally. I respond to every message personally. And I genuinely care about the outcome of every placement — because my reputation is built one hire at a time.
The relationships make
it work.
The best infrastructure engineers are deep in their work. They move when someone they trust brings them something genuinely worth considering. The relationships that make that possible take decades to build.
Infrastructure is our entire focus — the full depth of it, every day. We know the candidates, the companies, and the benchmarks by name.
Every search is run personally by me, from first approach to signed offer. When I take on a mandate, I'm fully committed to you.
Our network was built through decades of community events and genuine conversations — long before anyone was looking to move.
We can move that fast because we've already done decades of the slow work. When a brief lands, we know exactly who to call.
Where TrustIn shows up in the community.
Search that's embedded in the infrastructure community — not just sourcing from it. We speak at events, support open source initiatives, and are affiliated with startups at the intersection of technology and recruitment.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
Annual attendance across North America and Europe. A core touchpoint for understanding where the community is heading.
NeurIPS
Annual attendance at NeurIPS in San Francisco — connecting with the researchers and engineers shaping the next wave of AI infrastructure.
London DevOps
Active involvement with the London DevOps community — one of the largest and most active DevOps and Platform Engineering meetup networks in the UK.
CNCF Community
Active involvement in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem, including SIG participation and supporting engineering talent.
In-person, online, and always worth your time.
From roundtables in London to conference fringe events in San Francisco — small gatherings where real infrastructure conversations happen.
Infrastructure Leadership Dinner
An intimate dinner for senior infrastructure engineers and platform leads in London. Off the record, high signal, genuinely useful.
KubeCon London Meetup
A TrustIn-hosted side event alongside KubeCon — connecting engineers for drinks and real talk about the state of cloud-native.
Infrastructure Office Hours
Monthly open sessions — 45 minutes with Marcus to discuss infrastructure career moves, market conditions, or the space in general.
Build something infrastructure engineers actually need.
A quarterly challenge open to infrastructure engineers, platform teams, and open source contributors. Build a tool, workflow, or system that solves a real problem in the DevOps and cloud-native stack.
Current Challenge Theme
The AI Inference Infrastructure Challenge
Design or build a system that makes AI model deployment faster, cheaper, or more observable. Could be an open source tool, a reference architecture, or a cost optimisation framework. Teams of 1–4 welcome.
🏆 What you can win
- £2,500 cash prize for the winning team, split equally
- Featured write-up in The Infrastructure Brief, reaching 500+ engineers
- Direct introductions to infrastructure-focused VCs and CTOs
- Runner-up teams featured in the newsletter + office hours
Register your team
Solo entries welcome. Teams up to 4 people. Free to enter.