CTO / Technical Lead

Remote (NYC / SF / tech hub preferred)

Engineering

Summary

Cracked senior IC who has architected meaningful systems. 75%+ hands-on (coding, technical design, dev velocity). A sprinkling of mentorship / leadership. Founding team / cofounder-level equity depending on seniority.

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 Hari (our CEO), Loubna (our current Eng Lead), Barbara (our Product Lead) and the rest of the engineering team.

We're optimizing for:

• Raw horsepower ("the smartest person / 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 and has people who will follow
• Someone who wants to spend 75%+ of their time coding and building for the foreseeable future
• Someone who values speed over velocity

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
• 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:

• Prior experience with HR & Finance software
• Familiarity with our stack (Typescript, Node.js, React, Postgres, AWS, Render, Prisma, Synadia)
• Experience with building data pipelines / analytics products

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 much 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 the “art of 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 work:

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.