Journal 2025-04-17

Important Problems

Hacker News

HN: Who's hiring (2025-04)

Vision

• Bring a lean, user-centric approach to product innovation and software development by understanding the business needs before building anything.

Problems

• Heating & Cooling buildings
• Visas
  • We don't sponsor visas
  • Need a work permit
• "We aren't hiring junior developers right now"
• Expensive healthcare
• Doctors too busy for patient care
• Time zones / Team work
• Power grids / Tree Fall
• Hungry people
• Sick people
• Customer wait list
• Confusing/egregious medical bills or insurance communications
• Figuring out position
• Measurement
• Calibration
• Managing
• Language barrier
• Citizenship
• Successful codebase becomes large and complex - Instead of improving the product, devs spend more of their time just understanding the code and doing low-level tasks
• in the United States, healthcare outcomes for pregnancy are significantly worse than in other similarly developed countries.

Domain areas / Industries

• Material Science

Solutions

• High-quality, easy-to-use APIs
• Make automated trading decisions on global markets
• Note-taking
• Satellite Analytics
• Precise detection of trees and their height in high resolution imagery to protect our customers power grids from tree fall
• Open-source authentication platform
• Open source tool to generate comedy
• Real-time data integration platform
• Simulation engines
• user-powered library containing over 200M documents on every topic imaginable, added by its community.
• Autonomously construct buildings
• Brick-laying robotics
• provides education programs with a more holistic view of applicants by evaluating their soft skills
• provider of IP address data - Geolocation API
  • IP to Company
  • Carrier detection
  • VPN detection
• Analytics, automated bill management, and seamless integrations

Technology

• Heat pumps
• high-performance geometry kernels
• In-memory graph database
• geospatial queries

Goals

• Autonomy to build great products, skilled peers, opportunity for tremendous impact, competitive salary, and a very competitive ownership stake.
• High reliability, scalability, and security

Quotes

• Looking for strong software engineers who are up for a challenge
• Specialist in your field
• We feel strongly that teams should own their own processes, decide their own technologies, and design solutions for the long term
• Working in a highly collaborative team environment
• We’re looking for exceptionally productive, thoughtful, tasteful, and kind people with a passion for making software development better for everyone.

Clients

• Work directly with customers to understand their needs, design the right solution, and build from zero to one.

Team

• Elite engineering team
• Great team and killer traction
• Assembling the most talented team in the industry
• We are a group of friendly, smart, low-drama people, seeking the same to help us make (JOB) tools (JOB) dream about.
• We’re a senior team of 3 repeat founders, backed by a dozen CTOs who live this problem daily and want to help build the future.
• We process over 100 billion products per day and offer technically interesting and challenging work. We are looking for highly motivated and skilled engineers to join our team.
• We're always on the lookout for very strong generalist engineers who can operate at any layer of the stack (firmware, networking, UI, application code - whatever's needed!)
• We are a young company with a strong engineering culture and some unique data problems, which we are solving for our customers.

Social Proof

• Over 60,000 stars on GitHub
• We have a 6+ month customer waitlist!
• We've been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker

Business success

• PROFITABLE, SUSTAINABLE SMALL TEAM, MAKING SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT
• Profitable, remote-first, and fast-growing
• World-class designer
• We just finished YC and have been facing enormous growth. Now, we’re looking for smart, technical folks who love engineering as much as we do

Mindset

• Entrepreneurial mindset
• We care about slope, not where you are today.
• We work with a coach and value self-awareness and growth.

Missions

• We help startups and indie hackers to create new web projects quickly.
• We help the next generation of storytellers tell better stories.
• We believe the future of writing is human collaboration.
• (COMPANY) is hiring experienced (ROLE) to build high-performance infrastructure that powers real-time (DOMAIN) data for global markets.
• We tackle hard distributed systems problems at scale, from low-latency data processing to cloud/hybrid computing, leveraging cutting-edge open-source & proprietary technologies.
• We're tackling a $100B+ opportunity to transform data science, finance, healthcare, and science
• Our approach, (X) (published in Nature, 1M+ downloads, 3k+ GitHub stars), uses (TECH) on (DATA)) data to achieve state-of-the-art results (IN SITUATION)
• Demystify health insurance, healthcare and medical billing
• Our mission is to "Spark Human Curiosity".
• Craft the next generation of interactive learning and change how the world learns
  • Brilliant.org
• helping organizations take control of their utility data, reduce costs, and achieve sustainability goals

Practices

• We invest significant effort in enhancing our production setup (infra as code, top observability setup and more).
• Working in a small startup, bringing stuff from 0 to 1
• Enjoys close collaboration with end-users in solving their hard problems
• Our vision for this project is extremely ambitious, and you will be a crucial part of making this a reality

Personality

• Devtools are fun, and you spend way too much time thinking about programming languages, databases, and/or web frameworks
• You’ve always loved working on side projects, even if you’re only serving yourself as an audience

Remote / Time zones

• We encourage diverse candidates within 2 hours of USA timezones to apply.
• We’re based in Tokyo and this role is on-site. We’ll sponsor your relocation and visa. Our team is international, and we work in English

Testimonial

• I joined (COMPANY) in (YEAR) via its acquisition of (COMPANY) and stayed because of the challenging problems and the freedom to solve them. (COMPANY) values deep technical expertise and gives engineers real ownership over impactful projects.
• If you’re a Full Stack Engineer who enjoys dogfooding every day, we should talk

Events

• Our team will be on this Zoom room from 10:30AM-3PM PST today. Drop in to say hi, see a demo, and learn more about life on the team.

Tech Stack

• Our stack includes: Python, Haskell, Rust, PostgreSQL, Redis, Nix, Terraform, Nomad, Ansible

Hiring

• Looking for high achieving, full-time Software Engineers to join our team. Folks who have a good understanding of web technologies and want to help design, implement, launch, and scale major systems and user-facing features.
• Be part of the growth journey where you will lead a team of engineers and ship rapidly to make a product that can beat the likes of (X).

Blogs

• You can read more about our work on our tech blog.

Interests / Passions

• Familiarity / interest in cloud infrastructure tooling

Salary Ranges

USA / San Francisco

• $100K-170K, equity range: 0.5%-1.5%

USA / NYC

• Compensation: $160,000-215,000/year + equity

EU

• "110k EUR seems like the most common baseline I see for high-growth EU startups hiring engineers "
• Munich 80k as max at well funded startups
• "Well paying jobs are the ones at startups funded by US VCs. It's much easier to pay well when you think of EU talent as a 25-50% discount on bay area salaries."

To-Research

• Information theory
• Category theory
• Bayesian statistics
• Bloomberg - values deep technical expertise and gives engineers real ownership over impactful projects.

Ideas for finding Jobs

• Keep an eye out for routine funding announcements and applying directly via the company's page on Lever. I average around 1-2 recruiter inbound per month for this kind of role.

Process / Action

• If interested in job, send email
• Email
  • Resume CV
  • Link to Website
  • Tell me a little bit about yourself
  • Check out code repository

Experience

• Systems programming, programming for high performance and computer science
  • C++20, CMake, git, Linux.

In-demand roles

• Cloud engineer / AWS infrastructure
• Developer - Typescript
• Test engineer - QA
• App developer - React Native
• Hands-on and strategic Startup Operator - to strengthen our operations across finance, HR, compensation, global hiring, remote collaboration, and make us ready to scale as we move towards our product launch
• Founding engineer - autonomy to build great products, skilled peers, opportunity for tremendous impact, competitive salary, and a very competitive ownership stake.
• Machine Learning Engineers
• Machine Learning Ops
• Solution Engineers
• Head of Customer Success
• Sales
• Product Designer (visualization, 3d tools)
• Full Stack Product Engineer (typescript, postgres)
• Frontend Visualization Engineer (webgl, wasm)
• Product Engineer
• Design Engineer
• driven, entrepreneurial founding/Staff engineer.
• Lead Software Engineer, responsible for defining and implementing the organization’s overall technical strategy. Develop, test, release, and maintain applications and features to better serve our users. Manage and optimize our cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines to ensure high reliability, scalability, and security. Trusted partner to the founder/CEO, you have a key voice in shaping the future of our strategy, organization and product.
• Looking for a DevOps Engineer who loves Linux, thrives in infrastructure, and wants to be more than a script-writer. deeply passionate about Linux, servers, and containerized infrastructure. Write real code. care about doing things the right way: clean architecture, reproducible systems, and well-maintained infrastructure. Maintain, troubleshoot and implement new features. Deploy and configure workload for clients. Help build and extend. Join consultation projects where your infrastructure expertise makes a real difference. Collaborate with a globally distributed team that values clean, well-thought-out solutions.
  • Email your CV and relevant work to jobs@syself.com
  • https://syself.com/
• Python Software Engineer, team Marketplaces: develop our API and integrations with marketplaces
• Team Lead - Python Infrastructure and Performance: build reliable Python infrastructure and improve codebase maintainability - https://jobs.channable.com/o/team-lead-python-infrastructure
• Reverse engineers & vulnerability researchers
• Embedded software engineers, electronic design engineers, digital signal processing engineers, hardware reverse engineers, firmware reverse engineers, and low-level kernel developers
• Software Developer - build new systems, maintain existing systems, lead design, and mentor developers. The systems you’ll work in are mostly JavaScript and TypeScript, though we have some new code in Go. ideal for a quality-focused full-stack developer with strong technical proficiency who is looking to advance their career with a people-centric company that prioritizes work-life balance, invests in continuous growth, and builds products with meaningful social impact.
• This is an exciting opportunity to contribute your skills and expertise to a (VENTURE) venture based out of (GEO) and receive equity in exchange for your contributions.
• Flexible part-time schedule to accommodate other commitments
• Collaborative and supportive team environment
• If you are passionate about (TOPIC) development and interested in joining a (VENTURE) venture, we would love to hear from you. Please submit your resume if interested in this opportunity.
• building world-class interactive learning experiences that combine challenging problems, compelling narratives, and delightful visual storytelling
• Have strong relevant experience for what they need and put effort into the application, companies tend to move quite fast. I also only apply to a few companies for positions that I find interesting and where I know I can bring value. My response rate has always been 90%+, even when I don’t know anybody there or have a referral.
• data engineer to our data team. You'll work on improving our data pipelines, creating new data sets, optimizing queries, and helping us cement our position as an industry leader.

Personality

Important characteristics: - Resilience, work ethic, and curiosity - Bias towards shipping - Creative, optimistic, curious, rigorous, diligent, grit

Experience

• Must have backend experience operating at scale
• Bonus: experience with data visualization, familiarity with databases

Goals

• larger applicant pool, enables student success, and graduates better professionals.

Success / Accomplishment

• Since (YEAR), (PRODUCT) has been adopted by over (X) higher education programs

Questions

• Are you open to sponsorship?
• what your resume looks like and how you articulate the value you provide?

Interview process

• 30 min Zoom call with
• Technical take home assessment (paid, designed to be reasonably close to the job)
  • algorithmic
  • includes tasks like reviewing a colleague's pull request
  • tracking down a bug in response to a customer support ticket
• Panel interview with two engineering leaders
• Virtual onsite

Client Personas

• Early-stage startups, entrepreneurs
• Lawyers in India

Finance

• We have strong revenue
• We are backed by (CAPITAL)
• We're well funded (Series A, ~30 people)

Clients / Customers

• Great customers (CLIENTS)
• Like to work directly with customers and end-users

Product

• Work on a product people love

Process

• Working hard and making pragmatic decisions that keep the team shipping quickly

Quality

• We value quality in engineering at (COMPANY)

Team

• Highly talented, experienced coworkers

Culture

• Low ego, high integrity, highly collaborative, hard working

Companies / Organizations to check out

• Sequoia - Capital
• Supabase - open-source. Backend platform offering a Postgres database, vector extensions, auth, real-time functionality, storage, restful APIs, and edge functions.
  • Cloud Infra Engineer (security focus)
  • Customer Success Architect (Americas time-zone) "we manually check and respond to all the applications."
• Harvard
• Amazon
• Brilliant.org - Engineers at Brilliant think about both "building the right thing" AND "building the thing right" while pursuing high standards of excellence for ourselves, our product, and our codebase. If you're energized by the prospect of doing the best work of your career and changing how the world learns alongside the most talented peers you've ever worked with, you can learn more and apply here: https://brilliant.org/careers. We're a lean team that moves very quickly, so availability for synchronous communication is important to us. many folks on the team have familial and other responsibilities that they need to tackle during this window, and the team is very flexible about scheduling around these

Event ideas

• Quarterly gatherings

Terminology / Jargon

• Ansible
• Angular
• AWS API Gateway
• AWS //
• AST
• B2B
• BigQuery
• C++
• Compilers
• CI/CD
• CS
• Dbt
• Data mesh
• Datadog
• Docker
• DynamoDB
• Embedded
• NLP
• LATAM
• FastAPI
• Firebase
• Express
• ETL systems
• GitHub
• Haskell
• FE SWE - Front-end Software Engineer
• Firmware
• FPGA
• HTML
• Go - GoLang /
• K8S
• Kernel
• Kubernetes /
• Linux
• LLMs ///
• MongoDB
• NextJS
• Nomad
• Infra
• Infra as Code
• gRPC - types, speed, versioning
• GraphQL - types, field selection/expansion, standards
• QA
• Reddis
• React ///
• Rust ////
• Observability /
• Postgres database /////
• Python ///
• NGinx
• Node
• NixOS
• Java
• JavaScript /
• SES - Amazon AWS service
• Spark
• SNS - Amazon AWS service
• SDK
• SDR
• Slack
• SQL ///
• Stack
• Terraform
• Typescript ///////
• Unix
• WebGPU
• WebAssembly
• YC - YCombinator

Ideal Job posting

• Compensation / salary
• Geo / Remote?

Yearly events

• We meet in person a few times of year in places like )(GEO), (GEO) and Hawaii.

NEXT...

• Trunk / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43547611