Full-time
Remote (NYC / SF / other tech hub preferred)
Summary
What a great candidate looks like
We're looking for an elite senior engineer. If that's you, you'll be responsible for the technical strategy & design, owning tradeoffs, and increasing teamwide velocity. You'll work closely with our cofounders Hari (CEO), Loubna (Engineering), Barbara (Product & Design).
We're optimizing for:
Someone who wants to spend 75%+ of their time coding and building for the foreseeable future
Raw horsepower (if someone has called you "the best engineer I've ever worked with")
Someone who is terrific at pattern matching and can think several steps ahead intuitively when making tradeoffs
Early stage startup experience
Can be a talent magnet when we grow the team
Someone who values speed (moving fast and learning even if we make some wrong choices) over velocity (getting it exactly right the first time)
There isn't one profile; but examples of great candidates might be:
A Staff / Senior Staff Engineer at a mature company with a high quality engineering culture (Stripe, Coinbase, Airtable, Figma) who has architected complex systems 0-to-1
A former CTO / technical cofounder at a startup
Founding engineer of a company that has seen some measure of success (e.g., Series B+)
Bonuses:
Familiarity with our stack (Typescript, Node.js, React, Postgres, AWS, Render, Prisma, Synadia)
Experience with building data pipelines / analytics products
Prior experience with HR & Finance software
Probably not a fit:
If you just have experience at a big company (be it Fortune 500 or FAANG)
If your greatest strength is being a people manager
If it's been longer than a year since you were actively coding
How we work
How we hire:
We strongly prefer work trials — 2 to 4 weeks — to make sure our styles are a good fit.
We want to hire fewer, better people. We want to keep the full-time team as small as possible for as long as possible. This means paying “market” for cash but “above market” for equity.
How we build:
Our “process” is very open-ended, and we strive for a highly autonomous culture of building.
We don’t do agile, we only do retros when needed, and we have quick syncs ~3 days a week for 30 mins each.
Our desired moats are our deep expertise (often expressed in our data model) and our speed of iteration — so we will always keep investing in these two things.
We don’t have strong preferences for tools. Our engineering culture prioritizes getting shit done over the “art of engineering”. Engineering isn’t an art, it’s a craft. If users don’t use, understand, or like what we’re doing, then our hard work was pointless. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it even fall? No. No it didn’t.
We want every person to dive into the subject matter with relish. You should really care about the nuances and nitty gritty of how the real world operates. At this stage / scale of our company (~Seed), everyone should hopefully know most of the codebase layout intuitively, and most of the pieces of our architecture intuitively.
How we make decisions:
We're highly feedback-oriented. This doesn't mean being rude, but it does mean being direct. We're thoughtful of feelings, but don't prioritize feelings over better outcomes and better answers.
We choose a low ego approach to decisions even if that results in more chaos and thrash, and more rapid turns.
Speed is more important than velocity. We try to move fast even if it means we sometimes build the wrong things — the goal is to just learn by doing and be a “heat-seeking missile.”
“If you're pre product market fit, the best advice that I have from that period is, action produces information. So just, just, like, keep doing stuff, you know?”
— Brian Armstrong
We try to make high context decisions, which means that we try to overshare and overcommunicate (without process around it... just means that when in doubt, share more).
We love people who have a founder / founding team mindset and want to be fucking unleashed.
We swear a bit.
