It may be Thanksgiving week in the U.S., but the job search never sleeps, amirite? So I didn’t want to leave you hanging this week.

Xoxo,

Jordan 🦃

A Q&A with Aaron Tan of Syncere

The fine folks over at Syncere are making robots for your home. Let’s be clear: these are not dystopian humanoid robots that might kill you in your sleep. They’re beautiful robots that do things like fold your laundry. Think: If Luxo Jr. from Pixar crossed wires with the Fairly Odd Parents🪄✨ robots that fold your laundry but make it fashunz ✨

I talked to CEO and co-founder Aaron Tan about who he wants in his house.

He’s hiring for two roles right now: a robot research scientist and a hardware engineer. There’s an open-ended application on their site too, so I asked Aaron who he hopes will shimmy in there.

What kind of people work at Syncere?

We have a kind of underdog mentality, but a very competitive nature.

In the home robotic space, it’s either startups like us or it’s, like, Tesla or Figure or 1X—someone that’s been in the game for 10+ years. We’re going to be fighting an uphill battle against those with higher resources, more engineers, yada, yada, yada. We’re taking a very contrarian approach. We want to take basically the not-so-obvious bet, working backwards from making it beautiful.

Are you only looking for full-timers?

Ideally, we are looking for full-time. I know that some folks, especially for the research role, are still in school, wrapping up PhDs. If people are looking for an internship for a semester or two, we’re also open to that.

Why should they want to work with you?

We’re making a bet against the entire home robotics industry. It’s a big bet. It’s a high-risk, high-upside type of thing. I think we are pioneering quite an interesting angle to the home robotics space that I don’t see many people doing just yet.

Who would you love to see slide in through the general application?

Artistic people. People who are very creative. As much as we are a robotics company- that is core - we are a design-first company. Robotics is a means to deliver the solution. We aren’t trying to sell the robot, we’re trying to sell the service. Our people need to think clearly about consumer sensibility.

Can my friends contact you?

An email to me is best (aaron@syncereai.com). Attach a resume and whatnot, and be very to-the-point on why you want to join and what your skills are.

I want to know…

I’m a personal fan of cover letters. At worst, they get ignored. At best, they could be the difference between being considered or not being considered. I want to know how you feel about them when the employer doesn’t explicitly request them.

It ain’t too late for something new

With fewer than 60 days left in 2025, some of you may feel like throwing in the towel. DON’T. I wouldn’t bother putting out a newsletter on Thanksgiving week if I didn’t sincerely think it was worth your time to keep trying.

Here’s more words of encouragement from fellow recruiting maestro Asher Hoffman.

A peek inside Cursor’s recruiting process

Brie Wolfson of Positive Sum spent two months embedded with the Cursor team (currently hiring for two dozen roles) and wrote about it for Colossus (a long but very worthwhile read for a peek into the enigmatic decacorn).

Here’s what she had to say about their recruiting process:

Cursor’s secret to recruiting is to treat the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job spec. Let me explain.

At most companies, the recruiting process looks something like this: identify a hole in the company’s ability to execute on some function, open up a job, source a list of people, interview some of those people, hire one, start them a couple months out.

At Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this: post the name of someone really, really good in the #hiring-ideas channel in Slack, swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews (wide range of “process” here), and if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.

Jobs for the elite pie lover

Sorry, I mean π, or is it Pi, or 🥧? The buzziest name in AI startups is also known by its full legal name, Physical Intelligence. They’re running with $600 million in backing and a valuation of $5.6 billion. 😳

Well, good news: They’re hiring.

Worth noting are…

• A head of creative to tell the story of Physical Intelligence … beyond the lab.

• Internships in mechatronics and hardware system (+ a general internship app)

• A robot operator to deliver high-quality, high-volume demonstrations of tasks by teleoperating their robots.

New jobs

The folks at Momentic, the AI-powered testing tool for web and mobile, are hiring at their SF HQ. They have a new $24 million series A as of this week.

Composite is on a mission to finish what traditional software started by turning every professional into the composer of their work, starting in their local browser. They’re looking for a founding engineer.

Ambrook, which makes financial tools for indie, family-run businesses, is hiring across product, growth, and engineering, including a founding infrastructure engineer.

AI interpretability research lab Goodfire is hiring for in-person roles at their office in Telegraph Hill in SF. Highlights include a chief of staff ($200K–$400K) and a technical product marketing manager ($175–$300K).

Archetype AI, founded by ex-Googlers, is the physical AI company helping humanity make sense of the world. They’re hiring in R&D, product & design, GTM, marketing, and sales. All jobs are full-time, on-site in Palo Alto.

Stuut Technologies are taking their new $29.5 million series A and making hires in NYC and SF. Lots of tech staff roles, plus sales, marketing, operations, and design.

OpenHands is an open source, LLM-powered software agent that needs engineers and a product marketing manager. These jobs are REMOTE. They have a fresh $18.5 million series A.

Maxima, the agentic AI platform for enterprise accounting, has a bunch of open jobs in engineering and GTM, most of them on site in San Mateo, but some are REMOTE. They’ve got a $41 million series A

The AI-native cross-border tax compliance engine Sphere is hiring in engineering, AI, sales, customer success, ops, and tax. They have a brand new $21 million series A. Most of them are on-site in SF, but a few are REMOTE.

Lots of REMOTE jobs at Flex, the finance super app for business owners. Think engineering, finance, legal, marketing, product, and sales. Highlights include a director of underwriting and a director of legal.

Gamma, wizard of a tool for AI-generated presentations, websites, and social media posts has a new valuation of $2.1 billion and $100 million in ARR. They’re hiring dozens of new smarty smarts across all departments.

12 founding jobs that aren’t for engineers

Founding engineers get a lot of glory. I mean, they do brilliant work, but let’s not forget about the non-technical staff that get startups up and running and out into the world.

• Momentic needs a founding marketer and a founding account executive.

• Wispr Flow needs a founding account executive.

• Lorikeet needs a REMOTE founding talent sourcer/coordinator.

• Vanta needs a founding strategic account executive for the EMEA region.

• Omnea needs a founding account manager.

• Allium needs a founding product designer.

• Peec AI needs a founding people ops manager.

• Numeric needs a founding business ops and strategy person.

• Cogent needs a founding recruiter.

• Gradient Labs needs a founding growth marketer.

• Dyna Robotics needs a founding creative lead.

Required reading

As you crash into a food coma on your relatives’ or friends’ sofa this week, perhaps you might enjoy a little light reading.

• Lovable hit $200 million ARR.

• A builders guide to living a long and healthy life.

Happy Thanksgiving. I’m most grateful for you. Truly.

Okay, maybe Bacon too.

Jordan

Lot’s of jobs this morning, but I wanted to start with this chart which made its social media rounds this week.

This is a translation of Shohei Ohtani’s handwritten goal chart from his freshman year at Hanamaki Higashi High School, framing it as a “goal management sheet” or “dream map.” For those that don’t know of Shohei: many would argue he’s the greatest baseball player to have ever played the game

I’m sharing this because the framework could easily be applied in all manner of professional careers, and if it helped develop one of the world’s most capable athletes, it might help you too.

ps… Shohei first authored this goal management sheet when he was 15 years old 🤯

Poll me this

A lot of chatter this week on LinkedIn about how many interviews is too many interviews. I’d like to know your opinion…

Q&A with Doppel’s co-founder

AI-native threat intel platform Doppel has 29 open jobs, some of them REMOTE and the rest in NYC and SF. I asked co-founder and CTO Rahul Madduluri what kind of company he hopes to build, and how you can get his attention. Here’s what he said.

What kind of culture do you want to create at Doppel?

We want to create a culture where people can work on really hard problems with a team that cares about the mission, the customers, and each other. Speed and ownership, powering a tight feedback loop between our team and our customers are at the core of our culture and how we operate.

Why should someone want to work at Doppel?

Doppel is solving one of the most important problems in the post-AI world: social engineering. With AI, attackers can generate countless personalized attacks at almost no cost. We’ve grown extremely quickly, and with our brilliant team, resources, and guidance from investors like a16z and Bessemer Venture Partners (who lead our Series A and B), we are best positioned to tackle this problem.

If you’re ambitious, curious, and hardworking, Doppel is a place where you can excel and quickly accelerate your career. Our team works hard, but has a lot of fun working together in-person in San Francisco and New York too. We also host quarterly offsites that bring everyone together.

How can applicants get your attention?

Send me a DM on LinkedIn! We’re hiring actively across engineering, design, and data science. We’re looking for candidates with evidence of exceptional ability.

What’s something (or things) that applicants shouldn’t do?

Avoid generic resumes or vague descriptions of your work. Be specific and show what you built, how it worked, and what impact it had.

What skills or traits are particularly hard to find, but Doppel really needs?

Extreme persistence paired with strong technical fundamentals are a rare combination, and we’re always looking for people with both.

Toby Talks: so, you want to be an expat?

For those interested in striking out for new frontiers, Andrew Stetsenko at The Global Move wrote this post about how to find companies open to hiring global talent. Here’s the TL;DR.

• Check LinkedIn to see how distributed their current team is.

• Search LinkedIn for the terms “relocation support,” “business sponsorship,” and “we support international candidates.”

• Search the LinkedIn jobs page for keywords “visa,” “relocation,” “work permit,” “sponsorship,” and “international applicants.”

• Check official government lists of companies allowed to sponsor visas.

• Try Andrew’s International Job Search Handbook.

Open jobs

Corporate expense management platform Ramp has been in the headlines lately for achieving a $32B valuation three months after hitting $22.5B. 🔥 They’ve got 122 jobs open.

Here’s something very meta: the applicant tracking system Ashby has 51 open jobs at the moment from customer support to contracts to engineering. Now, if you’ve applied for a startup job in the last 12 months, you’ve likely used this platform. They’re widely used and in high demand. These are REMOTE jobs all over the world.

Mobile services operating system Gigs has 27 open roles across the U.S. and Europe. We’re talking about pretty much all departments, from bizOps to GTM, engineering, data, comms, and HR. They’re even looking for an executive assistant.

Peec AI, the AI search analytics platform for marketers, has more than two dozen open jobs in Berlin. They’ve made headlines recently for their $21 million series A (just four months after their seed), an ARR of $4 million just 10 months after launch, and a roster of 1,300 customers. Oh, and valuation north of $100 million. 😳

Generative image and video modeler Black Forest Labs needs 19 new people in SF, London, and Freiburg, Germany. A wide variety here too, including growth marketing, recruiting, research, machine learning, bizOps, and more.

Eventual, a startup making multimodal data processing a reality, needs engineers and a marketing associate to work in their SF office. They also need a software engineering intern and a new grad software engineer.

Developer intel platform Span is hiring in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and in the US. Some US jobs are REMOTE. They have a brand new $17 million series A as of this week.

Kanu AI is working on a system that builds, tests, and deploys production-ready apps and infrastructure code directly inside developers cloud accounts. They’re hiring 3 engineers and a GTM Lead, preferably working in Seattle.

Impulse Labs, which has built a stovetop that looks like a DJ’s turntable for cooking up some serious beets, needs a customer relations manager for their marketing team and a software engineer. They’re also taking general apps for internships.

Universal AI concierge Lorikeet is hiring at their Sydney, Australia, HQ, and for REMOTE roles in the US. They also invite applicants to “pitch” them a role, so go wild! 🎸

AUI, which is building the next generation of conversational AI agents with Apollo, is hiring in product management and engineering in NYC and Tel Aviv. So far, they’re backed by $20 million with a $750 million valuation. Email recruitmentaui@aui.io to apply. Those interested in product management roles should send a two minute video of yourself alongside your resume to careers@aui.io explaining why you’re interested in AUI.

Spotlight on: Customer Success

CS and CX become critical at the GTM stage. In other words, a BFD. Without them, startups don’t grow, and they can’t acquire new customers. Here’s to you, customer wizards.

• Synesthesia needs a director of customer success in London.

• Arta needs a REMOTE relationship manager on their customer success team.

• Span needs a customer success rep to work a hybrid role in SF.

• Rootly needs a customer success manager in Toronto.

• Halcyon needs a customer success manager in the UK.

• Whop needs a customer success manager in Brooklyn.

• Narmi needs a director of customer success for a hybrid role in NYC.

• Butlr needs a REMOTE customer success manager to work near San Francisco, Boston, or North Carolina.

• Ashby needs a REMOTE high-touch customer success manager to work East Coast hours and another to work West Coast hours.

• Lovable needs a customer success manager in Boston or SF.

• Rain needs a customer experience QA lead to work a hybrid schedule in NYC.

I’ve always wanted to be an … AI tutor

AI research and product startup Reka is hiring an AI tutor to 21st century Jane Eyre this shit and work REMOTELY in the U.S. or UK. They’re looking for someone with…

• Excellent writing skills.

• Proficient in English (native speaker or C2 level).

• Prior experience as a copywriter, prompt engineer, or AI tutor.

• Experience with Python and data analysis is a plus.

Required reading

• Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey have inked a deal with ElevenLabs (50+ open jobs) to license their voices. This could be your chance to work with sweet sweet tones of the sexiest man alive and also Matthew McConaughey.

• This guide on connecting Home Assistant to Cursor AI to build a DIY multi-zone heating system.

A closing thought

For inspo: these words from Igor Šarčević at Morning Coffee.

Everything you see around you was someone’s passion project. Before the mass production, before the focus groups, before the value engineering. There was just someone who couldn’t let go of an idea. Someone who looked at the impossible problem and said “I can solve this.”

Come back soon, love me, as I love you.

❤️‍🔥 Jordan

This issue contains dozens of reasons why I love you. Each and every one of them a job (or something that will make your future ☀️🌟💫)

Your ✨BFFs 😎

Jordan (+Bacon, who is ready to play ball)

First, a question motivated by Troy Kirwin…

Networking is one of the best ways to land a new gig, but some say a killer cold email can work miracles. I want to know: how did you find your last role?

P.S. If you’re interested in learning cold email strategies, lmk and I’ll do a lil baby feature on them. 😘

Good news in numbers

According to Carta’s State of Startup Compensation report from the first half of 2025:

• Across all ranks and all roles, the average salary for new hires at startups is up 5.8% over 2022 numbers, with much of that increase taking place in the last 18 months or so.

• Roles making the most progress are: legal, product/design/marketing, and engineering.

Both voluntary departures and layoffs trended downward in the first half of the year.

Bee-you-tee-full j.o.b.s

Clinical nutrition platform Nourish has 70 open jobs right now, with many of them in GTM. These roles are located all over the U.S.

We need to talk about Valar Atomic’s $130 million series A. 😵‍💫 They’re scaling clean nuclear energy for industrial power. All open jobs are in Hawthorne, CA, or Orangeville, UT.

Astrus, which makes software tooling that empowers analog designers to create advanced microchips with AI, is hiring for a handful of tech roles, including an analog design lead and a layout methodologies lead. All jobs are in Toronto or Waterloo, Canada. Reach out to careers@astrus.ai or Steph Hector on LinkedIn for more details.

Employee leave management software startup Cocoon is hiring for a few roles, all of them REMOTE. Perks include unlimited PTO + other types of paid leave, like bereavement/compassionate and parental.

Forward this to your favorite social worker. ❤️ Youth mental health platform Marble Health is hiring in its NYC offices across engineering, ops, growth, and even clinical therapy.

Osmo is teaching computers how to smell. Really. Hopefully they’re good whiffs, tho. All jobs are on the East Coast. Highlights include a fragrance analyst and a robot operator. Honestly, sign me up for either of those. Also, Bacon could teach these computer noses what’s up (or down).

Agentic security platform Daylight Security is hiring in Singapore, Tel Aviv, and the US. US jobs are REMOTE.

Agentic AI marketer Blaze is hiring for REMOTE jobs in the US, UK, and Canada. They say they’re looking for people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives who aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo. So go get ’em, tiger.

Agentic security platform Teleskope is hiring in data science, engineering, and GTM in their NYC offices. They do have a REMOTE position for an account executive with an OTE of $300K–$340K. 💸

There are 22 open jobs at AI video creation engine HeyGen. These are mostly West Coast roles and a few in Canada. We’re talking AI research and development, engineering, marketing, product, and sales. AND internships in product management and biz dev.

Autonomous SWE agent Ona (FKA Gitpod) is hiring in the U.S., UK, and Germany for CX, growth, product design, and product marketing. All these jobs are REMOTE. Wheeeee!

Toby Talks: How to get your money’s worth

Haseeb Qureshi (former Airbnb, current managing partner at crypto fund Dragonfly) wrote this great post about how to negotiate your comp.

Here’s the TL;DR

• You should always negotiate. “It’s a signal of competence and seriousness.”

• Get everything (not just the #s) in writing.

• Don’t show your cards. Guarding your information can give you power. (Mwahaha!)

• Stay positive. Defeatists have already lost.

Don’t capitulate to “exploding offers.” That is, offers that expire in 24–48 hours. Push back. In most cases, they will give you more time. And, if they don’t give you more time… are you sure you want to be working for them? Companies are typically on their BEST behavior during the hiring process; if they are already using coercion at this point in your relationship, just imagine how they may behave in the future once “they have you.”

Spotlight on: startup recruiting j.o.b.s.

Recruiters need jobs too. Without heroes like these (okay, like meeee), founders couldn’t build the companies they do.

Startups are built on people. Period.

• AI-powered search and productivity platform you.com needs a contract technical recruiter and a contract senior recruiter in SF.

• AI research lab Symbolica needs a sourcing recruiter for AI and ML talent in London.

• Portable nuclear reactor startup Radiant needs a contract senior technical recruiter in El Segundo, CA.

• Insurance claims simplifier Candid Health needs a recruiter for product and design roles based in Denver, NYC or SF.

• Safety-focused healthcare LLM Hippocratic AI needs a REMOTE GTM recruiter.

• Next gen telecom startup Gigs needs a senior technical recruiter to work in Berlin, Amsterdam, or London and a GTM talent partner in NYC.

• Gen AI and video platform Black Forest Labs needs a talent partner based in SF or London.

Founding jobs

Be a founding member of a brave new country. I mean company. And you don’t even have to be an engineer.

• The amazing Elena Wagenmans, founder of Taya (AI jewlery!), is searching for a founding software engineering lead to work with her in SF.

• The no-introduction-needed Lovable needs a founding customer success manager.

• Agentic AI marketer Blaze needs a founding GTM lead.

• Customer support platform Lorikeet needs a founding talent sourcer and coordinator.

• AI-native knowledge management platform Liminary needs a founding product manager.

• Agentic security platform Daylight Security needs a founding marketing manager.

• Document parsing platform Reducto is making a lot of founding hires, including a founding head of marketing, a founding head of finance, and a founding security engineer. See all of them here.

Required reading for you smarty smarts

• This guide to vibe coding for beginners.

• Why so many people think the Fruit of the Loom logo is a cornucopia (it ain’t).

• Genius-level AI scientist Yann LeCun says he’s leaving Meta to launch his own startup.

Yours, always and forever,

❤️‍🔥 Jordan

A hot and fresh newsletter cooked up for you. 🔥

• 39 jobs at Lovable

• 49 jobs at Lila Sciences + 13 internships

• 6 platforms for practicing interviews

• 1 tip about getting past the phone screen

• 1 sales job that pays $500K

• + more jobs than I can count (not really but it’s a lot)

Love,

Jordan

Polling America

In the spirit of election week, please vote on this equally consequential question. The state of our democracy depends on it.

39 open jobs at Lovable 🦄

The world-famous vibe coding unicorn Lovable has THIRTY-NINE open positions right now, across pretty much all functions. A few highlights for our non-techies:

• A product evangelist, for those who love Lovable and want everyone else to love it too

• A people operations manager, for those who love to keep Lovable people working

• A gaggle of recruiting roles, including a GTM Recruiter, a RecOps Lead, a Technical Recruiter.

• … and a literal army of sales people (see the link above for the full list)

Here’s Lovable’s hiring process:

1. Fill in a short form then jump on an initial exploratory call.

2. A quick take-home asking to present your best work over a loom video presentation.

3. A round of interviews to discuss your experience in more depth

4. Trial work lasting 1–2 days remote or on-site. We’ll see how you tick and you get to meet the team and explore whether joining Lovable feels right for you.

Company spotlight: Lila Sciences

Send this to your favorite scientist or smarty pants.

Lila Sciences, which is building scientific superintelligence, just closed a life-affirming $350 million series A. This is a smarty smart team, employing a zillion PhDs already, but you don’t have to be a doc to work there.

They have 49 open jobs, including 13 (not unlucky!) internships in…

• IT and security

• Automation workcell build (yeah idk what that means either)

• Life science automation & AI

• Security & cloud engineering

• Product strategy (life sciences)

• Product strategy (physical sciences)

Jobs

Kaedim builds ML algos to turn 2D images into 3D models. They’re hiring across engineering and design, including an art director, a 3D art/artist lead. Perks include gym memberships and weekly boba sessions. Slurp slurp. Check their GitHub for app instructions and info about company culture.

Reevo, the GTM sales operations platform, has 23 open jobs(!), including a huge GTM team and lots in R&D. Jobs are based in SF or Santa Clara.

Voice AI company Synthflow has 17 open jobs at the moment. They’re hiring across engineering, people operations, GTM, and product. Many of them are REMOTE.

AUI needs engineers and product folks to help them build next gen conversational AI agents. Jobs are in NYC, Tel Aviv, and Ramallah. Email recruitmentaui@aui.io to apply.

AI omnicloud Mithril needs engineers and a founding senior product manager to work in SF or Palo Alto. All roles run $170K–$230K base.

AI research lab Symbolica needs various R&D engineers and a sourcing recruiter for AI and ML talent. These jobs are in SF or London.

Ekho, which makes software to automate automotive sales, needs a tax and compliance research specialist, a founding GTM role, and a full-stack engineer to work in their NYC office. Perks include free lunch and dinners and an annual team offsite.

Basic Capital is trying to build a better 401(k), and they want your help doing it. They need engineering, sales, and operations help in their NYC offices.

🤑 Kaizen, which mates user-friendly software for America’s public services (long overdue!) is hiring for hybrid roles in their NYC HQ. Think deployment, engineering, ops, talent, and sales. In fact, they need a head of sales with OTE 50/50 split of $450K–$500K. Wowzaah!

AI-powered fraud fighter SafetyKit is hiring across engineering, GTM, and product. With their $27 million series A, already boasts a client list that includes Patreon, Eventbrite, Upwork, Substack, and Character.ai. All jobs are based in SF.

Toby Talks-ish, six ways to practice interviewing

Everyone needs a little help sometimes, especially when it comes to interviewing. Here are six places you can practice your interviewing skills (soft and technical).

1. Google’s Interview Warmup can help with data analytics, marketing and e-com, IT support, project management, UX, cyber sec, and “general” (think soft skills).

2. Final Round has a lot of job seeker tools, including AI-powered resume builders, AI salary calculators, and interview simulators.

3. LeetCode helps developers prep for interviews in 14 coding languages.

4. interviewing.io lets users mock-interview with real people or AI.

5. CodeSignal has both interview prep and skill builders.

6. InterviewBuddy offers mock sessions, feedback, and coaching.

‘Make it painstakingly obvious you can do the job’

Exec coach Ashley Rudolph over at Reframed wrote about how candidates can stand out in a crowded job market. For those who never seem to clear the recruiter screen, she offers this advice:

A recruiter’s job is not to be impressed by your potential or your work history. Their job is to confidently say, “Yep, this person can do what we need. And they’re worth passing on to the hiring manager.”

Your job in this stage is to remove as much uncertainty as possible and make it painstakingly obvious that you can do the job. How?

• Study the job description like it’s an open-book test

• Bring clear, recent examples that directly map to the responsibilities

• Use language they understand, not internal jargon or vague strengths or if your aim is to shift industries, don’t use terms that don’t mean anything in your new industry. (Build bridges, don’t highlight gaps.)

Recruiters often aren’t experts in the function they’re hiring for. They’re listening for signals or relevant sound bites. If they keep asking for more detail or more proof, it’s usually a sign that you haven’t connected the dots clearly enough yet.

Required reading for the inquiring mind

• Packy McCormick over at Not Boring wrote about why we should take weird ideas seriously, quoting the writer Haruki Murakami: “If you only read the books that everybody else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” 😵‍💫 Which is really just a paraphrase of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

• Nvidia is thinking of putting $1 billion (with a b) in AI modeler Poolside. 😳

• The metaverse is rewriting the rules of who can be a K-pop star.

👨🏻‍💻 K that’s all

Xoxo,

Jordan

Bacon is locked in for Friday’s festivities–wbu? Send pics of your costumed pets (all species welcome). Let’s put our real MVPs in the spotlight.

PS. Can I make a request of you? If you were or are a founding hire, get in touch. I HAVE QUESTIONS.

Tell me everything, you hellions 🎃

I talk to candidates and hiring teams on a regular basis, and I’m shocked by how many people are either open to, or want to, work on a 9-9-6 schedule. I think I’m in a bubble…

To get the job, you have to show up

I like this post from William Liu at Simplify, who showed up to Tech Week and did the damn thing. Just by showing up he …

• 🎤 Gave a Berkeley student a 1 minute interview with my CEO

• 💀 Got recognized from my LinkedIn cringe

• 🧠 Met 10+ founders with insane dedication and vision

• 🌎 Met people from 4 different continents

• 🔥 Convinced an ML engineer to drop his job and found a startup

Applications are great. Facetime is better. GTFOut there.

Ask a founding engineer

Y’all say you want a founding job, but do you? In this occasional series, I’ll ask founding hires what it’s really like. First up:

Amsal Naseem is the founding engineer (and first hire) at Newton (the AI workflow platform for dental). He’s worked in health tech since 2018, and even had a small company of his own at one point, before joining Newton in March.

Why were you interested in being a founding engineer?

If you’re not in a position to start your own company, it’s a good move to join someone else’s as a founding engineer. By the time I’m ready to launch my own thing, this experience will give me a lot of credibility.

How do you feel about the risks?

I am paid less than the market rate for big tech, but I get equity from a startup. It’s a gamble, it’s a risk. But the greater the risk, the greater the reward. If the company works and the founders make an exit, they’re set for life. The founding engineer may not be set for life, but they will have enough to start over.

What were you surprised to learn?

When I had my own company, I always questioned my validity as a founder. I thought everyone else knows what they’re doing. But I learned that’s not true. The most valuable lesson I have learned is that you don’t have to know everything but you have to be open to learning.

What do you tell others who think they want to be founding engineers?

If you’re a 9-to-5 person, if you have responsibilities, if you want work-life balance, this role is not for you. If you’re the founding engineer, you’re working 70%–80% of what the founders are working.

So, you still want to be a founding engineer

Respect.

• Bead AI is automating SOX testing with AI agents, they’re hiring a founding engineer based in either London or SF.

• Open Sesame is building a language-first interface, they’re hiring a founding AI engineer and a founding design engineer to work in their Toronto office. 🐦

• Kintow is automating back-office for restaurants, they’re hiring a founding engineer who can work remote.

• Brew.new, which calls itself “Lovable for email marketing,” needs a frontend founding engineer.

• Saba Mohsin is hiring an AI/ML founding engineer for her stealthy climate tech startup. DM Saba on Linkedin to apply.

• Andy Wang at tax/accounting startup Finta needs a founding engineer in SF. Base pay runs $180K–$300K.

What does, and doesn’t, matter anymore

Igor Šarčević over at Morning Coffee wrote about hiring in the age of AI. LLMs have changed everything … except hiring (for now). His latest post is about the signals that do, and don’t matter for engineers these days. Here’s a sample:

Doesn’t matter: syntax

Knowing the exact syntax for language features is less important when AI can fill in the gaps. Syntax memorization was always a proxy for something else: how much time someone had spent in the language ecosystem.

Does matter: systematic thinking

Engineers with this streak treat a prompt the way they treat a function. They define the goal, note the constraints, and sketch how to confirm the output. They run the loop, look at the result, and test it. When it fails, they change one variable at a time.

💀Open jobs💀

Okay this is important!!!! The AI voice model geniuses at ElevenLabs are hiring for more than FIFTY open roles. These positions are based all over the world, and some are REMOTE. YOU’RE WELCOME.

Generation Lab wants to help people live longer. An “ageless generation.” They need a science lead to head up DNAm and TBS data analysis, whatever that means. But for us normals, they also have a head of product head provider of growth (business growth, not, like, brain growth).

Emily Cooper may not be working in Paris this season, but that doesn’t mean you can’t. 🇫🇷 Paris-based procurement software platform Pivot is hiring engineers, plus ops and CS folks to travailler dans leur bureau en France.

AI agent infrastructure platform Keycard, with its fresh $38 million backing, needs engineers and a founding marketing hire to work REMOTELY in Canada or the US.

Flow, the workflow for hardware development, has a hot and fresh $23 million series A and is hiring across engineering, sales, ops, and marketing. Jobs are in London and SF.

AI-native documentation platform Mintlify has SEVENTEEN open roles in its SF office. Engineering, sales, design, developer relations, CS, and recruiting. Perks include free mints and free Ubers. One arguably more valuable than the other.

Infisical, which calls itself an end-to-end secrets management, has SEVENTEEN highly secretive jobs open right now, many of them REMOTE.

Starbridge has a $42 million series A and TWENTY open jobs. While most are in NYC, some are REMOTE.

AI-native security analytics platform Vega and their super-duper cute website are hiring in Israel and the US.

Customer intel platform Enterpret is hiring for engineering in Bengaluru, GTM in NYC, and product in Bangalore. BONUS TIP: If one of the roles at Enterpret really speaks to you, then use the “dream job” function in Greenhouse.

SylphAI, an applied research lab automating every layer of engineering, is hiring engineers, web developers, and a chief of staff. DM co-founder Li Yin on LinkedIn to apply.

Job spotlight: tech marketing

Engineers may build the tech, but marketers make it sing. Forward this newsletter to your fave tech marketer and share the love. ❤️

• ElevenLabs needs a REMOTE SEO content marketer.

• Infisical needs a technical content marketer in SF and a REMOTE founding growth marketer.

• Strella needs a marketing manager in NYC (hybrid!).

• Sequence needs an AI-native founding marketer in NYC or London.

Required reading

• We knew this day would come! Wonder Studios is bringing gen AI to Hollywood. They raised a $12 million seed (they need a creative technologist BTW).

• “We will never build a sex robot,” says Mustafa Suleyman.

k i’ll be thinking about you every day.

👨🏻‍💻 jordan + bacon (who just got a hair cut)

Happy Wednesday. Did you know that job seeking activity peaks on Tuesday afternoons? The assumption: people who hate their job, hate it most on Tuesdays. So… good thing it’s not Tuesday? 😅

Today’s menu:

• A confessional poll

• A self-reflection exercise for job seekers

• Tips for career changers

• How much more $$ AI skills will net you

• Oh, and JOBS of course

PS, last week you were all incredibly generous sending your thoughts and feedback. Just wanted to take a moment to say thank you 🙏

Pokémon GO to the polls

Two-thirds of job seekers use AI when applying to jobs. Wbu?

Questions to ask (yourself) before you accept a job

I like this post from Ben Lang over at Next Play about what you should be asking startups (and yourself) before you sign up for a job. Take out your glitter pens and do a lil self-reflection before you sign that offer:

• What is important to you as you think through this decision? What is less important?

• Why do you want to join?

• What are your expectations for the role? Why?

• What are your expectations for the company? Why?

• What do you think of the people at the company? Why do you think those things?

• Do your answers to these last three questions align with the reason you want to join?

These questions seem obvious - so much so, that most people assume they’ve answered them for themselves in the head - but if they are forced to write them out fully they often realize they haven’t fully made the argument that even convinces themselves.

A job searching tip for all my career changers

Salesforce’s Daniel Garcia on how he got a job in tech sales after eight (!) years in logistics. But honestly, these work for everyone.

The TL;DR:

• Meet your heroes: Find people who have your dream job and ask how they got it.

• Quality over quantity: 10 really well done applications will get you further than 100 meh ones.

• Learn a new language: Take the time to translate your experience into the language of your dream role/industry. Don’t expect recruiters to do the word math for you.

Open jobz

Good golly oh molly, I think we need to talk about this $133.7 million dollar SEED round raised by General Intuition, the frontier research lab dedicated to games.🤩 They have EIGHTEEN open jobs in their NYC offices, including an action policy researcher and a video editor.

Autonomous shipping truck company Wabi has FORTY open jobs across all functions, including a research internship and a PhD internship.

Real-time speech processor Sanas is hiring for sales roles. All are U.S.-based roles. Some are REMOTE.

Pulley makes equity management software for startups. They’re also hiring REMOTELY across customer success, design, and engineering.

Stella needs CX, engineering, GTM, and marketing folks to work on its AI-powered customer research platform. These roles are based in the NYC HQ. They have a hot and fresh $16 million series A as of mid-October.

Finch, which makes AI-powered pre-litigation software for personal injury law firms, has TWENTY-ONE open jobs in its NYC HQ. Many of them are founding positions!

Lighthouse helps tech U.S. companies secure visas for the world’s best talent—a super in-demand service right now. They have a several open positions in their Jackson Square, SF, offices, including engineering positions for new grads.

Zed, which closed a $32 million series B in August, needs engineers to work REMOTELY or in Boulder, CO. Neither of which are bad choices! They’re also open to remote workers in EU time zones. They tout unlimited PTO and work-life balance, a perk for anyone needing a break from the 996.

Back-office services platform (think payroll, tax, and compliance) Warp has a dozen open jobs across sales, growth, design, GTM, and engineering in NYC.

Here’s something super fun: India-based Airbound makes autonomous delivery drones. They’re hiring for mid- and senior-level roles in Bengaluru.

Good news for yew

PwC found that people with AI skills get 56% higher pay than people doing the same job without AI skills. So, if you don’t already know your sh*t, now is the time.

Required reading

• Jack & Jill, which just raised a $20 million seed, is trying to make job searching easier. Job seekers chat with Jack, who asks about their skills and the job they want. Then Jill, who works with recruiters, talks to Jack and together they find jobs for you. Lousy as a nursery rhyme but genius as a business. No open jobs just yet, but I’ll keep an eye out.

• Why we have pigeons to thank for AI breakthroughs.

• Also, someone tell me if they’re getting NVIDIA’s $4K supercomputer.

👨🏻‍💻 Thanks for reading. You mean the world to me.

ILY,

Jordan

If you’re here, I love you. Really. So does Bacon.

And if you love me (and this weekly goodness) drop me a line and tell me what you love, what we can do better, and what is missing that you really, really wanna see. I need some feedback about what’s working, and what’s not working!!!

Company spotlight: Thinking Machines

OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati is recently out of stealth with her ultra buzzy startup Thinking Machines. Their first product, Tinker, a training API for researchers, is still blinking its sleepy little eyes in a brand new world.

They need a product engineer, a data infrastructure engineer, and an infrastructure generalist. Thanks to their $2 billion seed announced this summer (omg it makes my eyes hurt to look at), these roles start at $300K.

Toby Talks (expert advice on landing that next j.o.b.)

I like this post from Anirban Kundu of Polymath Qapital, who writes about what gets evaluated in hiring (agency, attitude, and aptitude) but what really matters:

• Agency: “If you’re not happening to things, things are happening to you. Don’t wait for things to happen to you.”

• Attitude: “Agency gets you moving. Attitude keeps you moving.”

• Aptitude: This is table stakes. You can’t be an engineer unless you can code, “but once you cross the baseline threshold, what separates extraordinary careers from ordinary ones is not IQ points or résumés. It’s agency and attitude.”

Real talk you need rn

“Don’t be a generic ‘full‑stack developer’ or ‘product manager.’ Be the person who does [specific thing] for [specific industry] using [specific approach]. Make it so narrow that when someone needs exactly that, you’re the only name that comes up.” Nate B. Jones, AI strategist and product leader based in Seattle

⚡️Openne jobz ⚡️

Reducto turns messy, unstructured documents into structured data using AI that actually understands layout, handwriting, and form semantics. They also just announced their series B, bringing their total funding to $108M. They’re hiring across engineering and product to scale their document intelligence stack. Their office is in SF.

The AI-powered supply chain OS Auger, founded by former Amazon exec Dave Clark, is hiring across engineering, product, finance, and CS. All jobs are at their Bellevue, WA, headquarters.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Granted, which helps consumers get the max value out of their insurance plans, is building their founding team across engineering, operations, and marketing. Many of these jobs are REMOTE within the continental United States.

Relace, which builds infrastructure for coding agents, has raised a hot and fresh $23 million series A. They’re hiring for a few roles in SF. Notably: They’re open to hiring new grads for a machine learning scientist and their GTM engineer.

Kernel, the developer platform that lets AI agents use applications 🤯, is building its founding team. Jobs are in SF or Cincinnati. Heads up! They need an entry-level software engineer.

Foundational model lab Datacurve has a bunch of open roles in SF, including strategic project lead and founding design engineer. Everyone works a hybrid schedule in SF.

🚨 (REMOTE) - AI-native observability platform dash0 has TWENTY-ONE jobs open across CS, R&D, marketing, design, and sales. Many of them are REMOTE or hybrid. They’re comin’ atcha with a fresh $35 million series A.

EVEN MORE jobz

🚨 (REMOTE) - 3D reality capture app Polycam has a handful of REMOTE jobs open, including senior computer vision engineer and lifecycle marketing lead.

Mandolin, which makes automation software for specialty pharmaceuticals, is hiring in their SF offices, including a founding marketer, a senior tech recruiter, and an entry-level tech staffer (starting at $160K + equity).

Spline, the web-based, real-time, and multi-user 3D spatial design platform, is looking for a cloud security engineer, a ML research scientist, and a ML engineer (needs just 2 years of experience!).

Flint, whose autonomous website agent is backed by Sheryl Sandberg, is hiring its founding team in SF.

Further AI is making what they call the ChatGPT for the insurance industry, and they’re hiring in SF and India.

For your earz 🎧

• Podcast corner: Endless Thread and 99% Invisible have teamed up for a series called Hidden Levels, about how video games have made the world around us. If only they could capture how they’ve made my heart. 💜

• British corner: This old-school, 1996 BBC segment about the making of GTA.

Still reading? I meant what I said up top. I want to hear from you, for real. I ain’t writing this for nobody.

Thanks for being here

❤️ xoxo,

Jordan

It’s AI week at job hunting sux. Why? Because it’s AI week every week of 2025!

Table of contents:

• A look at one of the best gen AI video startups

• 200+ open jobs at AI companies (you don’t have to be an engineer to play)

• 8 internships / entry-level jobs

• Required reading for AI nerds

• Taylor Swift’s AI scavenger hunt

Company spotlight: Pika

Reality is optional, says Pika.

The AI video creation platform, with a total backing of $135 million, founded by Stanford AI lab dropouts Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, is making some of the most impressive gen AI video tools around. Check out their charming product video to see what I’m talking about.

They’re hiring across research, engineering, and creative, including part-time content creators.

Open jobs

Heidi, the AI platform for automating healthcare admin and ops, has SIXTY-FIVE OPEN JOBS. This company has everything: marketing to sales, engineering, product, design, customer success—you name it—located around the world.

Sierra, the conversational AI for business, has SIXTEEN open jobs at its SF office, including a social media lead, technical recruiter, and enterprise AEs. Lots to see here.

Our friends at Phaze - led by previously exited founder Benjy Boxer - are building next-generation remote desktop software that makes high-performance computing accessible from anywhere. Their platform lets creatives and engineers use top-tier workstations in the cloud with near-local performance. They are hiring 3 engineers (frontend, backend, networking) to work with their NY-based team.

🚨 (REMOTE) - DeepJudge, the AI platform for lawyers to leverage internal smarts and automate lawyerly workflows, is hiring in Zurich, Switzerland, and in the US and Canada. North American jobs are REMOTE.

Sovereign end-to-end AI platform webAI has ELEVEN open roles across engineering, R&D, and product.

Letta is “building the AI Operating System to turn stateless models into perpetual and self-improving intelligence.” 🤯 They’re hiring technical staff at their SF office.

Prime Intellect, which wants to democratize AI development at scale, has FOURTEEN open jobs, including an internship: They want “exceptional interns who’ve already built real systems, contributed to open-source, or gone deep across technical domains.” They also have an open call for unconventional talent.

Sitch - an AI-powered dating app co-founded by Chad DePue, and Nandini Mullaji (Stanford GSB), who recently appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show to talk about blending technology with her family’s matchmaking roots - is building an AI-powered matchmaker. Backed by top investors (including a16z speedrun!), Sitch is hiring a Founding Product Manager and City Partnerships Manager in NYC to help reimagine how people find love

Parallel (founded by former CEO/CTO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal) makes AI that’s crawling, indexing, ranking, retrieving, and reasoning with systems. They need talent in engineering, people, and product.

Netic, the AI platform that powers small business growth, has SIXTEEN open jobs, including four for new grads, in their SF offices.

Nous Research is on a mission to democratize the world’s best intel with open-source, humanistic AI. They need ML engineers, a research scientist, and a general counsel. Email your resume, cover letter, and portfolio to recruiting@nousresearch.com. Put the name of the role you’re applying to in the subject line.

Physical Intelligence is building general-purpose AI to power physical objects. They’re hiring across engineering, creative, ops, logistics, and more. They’re even looking for interns.

Moonlake, the vibe coder for interactive worlds, needs technical staffers and a head of operations at its San Mateo, CA, office. For the head of ops, they need someone who’s set up or run finance/HR stacks at an early-stage startup.

AI production engineer Resolve AI (from the creators of OpenTelemetry and researchers from Google DeepMind) needs a bunch of new people at its SF office, including engineers, salespeople, and social media wizards.

The financial crime–fighting AI agent Greenlite needs folks across engineering, deployments, and GTM at its downtown SF office.

Yutori is building an AI chief of staff for everyone. You too, friends. They need engineers, a brand designer, and an AI intern (experience with post-training multimodal LLMs (CPT, SFT, RL, search, reward models) is a plus, but not necessary.)

Naveen Rao (ex head of AI @ Databricks) is hiring for his new startup Unconventional, Inc. DM him on X or email jobs@unconv.ai

🚨 (REMOTE) - AI thought partner mem needs a REMOTE founding product marketer and a REMOTE senior fullstack product engineer to work West Coast hours.

Toby Talks (expert advice on landing that next j.o.b.)

ByteDance’s Zara Zhang on getting a job in AI: It’s all about side projects.

🔥AI investment by the numbers🔥

VCs are super hot for AI right now. According to a story from TechCrunch:

• VCs poured $192.7 billion into AI so far this year, out of a total $366.8 billion

• Last quarter, AI accounted for 62.7% of $$ invested by VCs in the US, and 53.2% of money invested globally

Required reading for those worried about AI stealing jobs

In case the internships/entry-level jobs above aren’t enough to convince you, here’s more proof that AI isn’t killing entry level jobs:

• A new report from Yale’s Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution found that all the screeching about AI killing all y’all’s job prospects just isn’t a thing.

• Michelle Vaz, managing director at AWS training and certifications says AI isn’t killing entry-level, just redefining it.

• Oh, and Taylor Swift fans are accusing her of using AI in her scavenger hunt videos. But maybe we should be asking ourselves why we’re letting T Swift send us on scavenger hunts. Did Google need traffic or something?

Adios, amigos!

Jordan

Today’s newsletter is extra beefy. Like a hefty bolognese topped with polpette 🤌

• how to get a job at Doctronic

• a long-form guide to landing a startup job in 2025 (with the TL;DR)

• video instructions on nailing the skill both OpenAI and Anthropic call essential

• a summer 2026 internship w/ housing included

Random off-topic - someone wrote me last week saying it was “not polite” to address you all as Sunshine.

Literally just helping and sharing jobs and people be crashing out over a salutation. Goodness.

Company spotlight: Doctronic

Doctronic is making that easier than ever with their personal and private AI doctor. And they’re hiring.

Doctronic’s co-founder Matt Pavelle gave me the scoop on who/what they’re looking for. And why you shouldn’t email him directly (please).

What are you doing?

We are trying to bring high-quality health care to everyone in the world and maybe even do it for free.

What’s it like over there?

We’re all very high energy, but we’re all very respectful. We’re actually pretty chill. Everyone has fun. We’re not looking for anybody that’s going to be pushy or abrasive. We’re a pretty flat-org. There’s no, ‘this person is the boss, and what this person says goes.’ We’re looking for people who are willing to share their ideas and have helpful things to say, but we always come to a consensus.

Who are you looking for?

We very specifically hire folks that have tried to start their own company. We’re hiring anyone that has startup experience, but we’re really selecting people that have tried. Right now, we’re only hiring very senior folks.

I’d love for this company to be wildly successful: Get your first $20 million out of it and then you can go start another company. We’re really going for people that can figure everything out by themselves.

What do you want from engineers?

There are some engineering teams that want to have these big, lengthy spec docs that outline everything. We’re the opposite of that. Here’s how we work:

• Anyone on the team might have a suggestion of something that we need to build.

• We’ll have a couple of sentences that roughly describe what we’re looking for.

• An engineer is expected to be able to grab that as a ticket, think about how they would solve it, talk with other engineers, write their own very lightweight spec document on how they would build it out.

• We review it.

• The engineer builds it.

What about your marketing hires?

We have been looking for people to help with SEO, because we get a lot of organic. Now there’s AIO or GEO for getting into all of the primary foundational LLMs. We need people to help with that. We are hiring people to help manage our paid campaigns. Then we have a lot of influencers we’re working with. We have people on the social side. There are a lot of roles because there’s a lot of expansion that we want to do.

How can my friends get in touch?

Honestly, the thing that I really don’t like is when somebody emails me directly. I get a thousand emails a day. If you’re filling up my inbox, I’m just going to delete it. That’s a shitty answer, but it’s the truth. All our jobs are on Ashby. You should just apply and do your best in the application process.

Open j.o.b.s.

Lots of hot and fresh series A startups coming at you this week!

Autonomous AI recruiter Alex, which announced a $17 million series A this week, is hiring across engineering, marketing, ops, sales… and a talent lead! All jobs are on site at their SF offices.

Vibe coder Anything is recruiting its founding team. These jobs are on site at their SF offices. They’re coming at you with a brand new $11 million series A this week.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Succinct “is the decentralized prover network that makes zero knowledge easy for everyone,” and they need people, people! The company is hiring for mostly SF-based roles, though some can be REMOTE. Take a look at the full list here, but a few highlights include a senior cryptography engineer and, for the writers out there, a content marketer with growth marketing experience.

Antimetal is using AI to manage and automate software infrastructure. They have 12 open jobs across engineering, design, sales, and ops. Jobs are on site at their NYC HQ.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Stablecoin global payment app Sling Money needs engineers and a (REMOTE!) controller, a product designer, and a few engineers. They tout both flexible work hours and flexible work locations.

AI-native investment bank OffDeal is hiring in NYC. Think engineering, biz dev, an EA, and an investment banker. They’re also looking for a fullstack software engineering intern for summer 2026 (housing included!)

🚨 (REMOTE) - Scrunch, which helps brands get seen in AI results (think SEO for AI engines), is hiring in the U.S. and Brazil. Some jobs are REMOTE!

AI-powered recruiting platform Juicebox, with their tasty $30 million series A, has 10 open positions at its SF HQ across design, engineering, growth, recruiting, and sales. I actually told my finance team today that we can cancel our LinkedIn Recruiter subscription after 13 years of devout use… specifically because Juicebox is a superior product. If that tells you anything about how good they are.

Dataframe startup Polars is hiring engineers based out of their office in Amsterdam. This “open source library for data manipulation” announced a $29 million series A this week.

Blacksmith is on a mission to build a CI cloud. With their brand new $10 million series A, they’re hiring engineers (in NYC) and some GTM folks (in SF).

Austin Tackaberry (ex-Databricks, ex-Uber) is looking for a founding engineer for his enterprise time-management platform ShareCal.

Shift is making an AI-native infrastructure for healthcare workforce operations. Co-founder Autumn-Kyoko Cushman is looking for a head of engineering ($200K–$400K) and a few founding engineers ($150K–$300K) in SF. They’re also offering a $15K referral bonus for leads. Email ashley@shiftrx.io to apply.

Toby talks

Hannah Zhang over at Nonlinear Techies wrote a super detailed post on how she landed a job at a marketing startup in 2025. It’s v good. (Okay, I’m mentioned in it, so maybe I’m partial. But she’s not wrong!) As a LinkedIn power user, I like this tip:

⚡️Make LinkedIn Your Landing Page⚡️

For both of my last startup offers, no one ever asked for my resume. They had my LinkedIn. What mattered was the experience and aptitude I showed in interviews and take-home assignments. So:

• Make your LinkedIn profile easily digestible by a founder, hiring manager, or recruiter. It’s not rocket science - have a profile pic, a summary that sounds like a human wrote it, and include keywords in your headline that someone searching for your target role would use.

• Engage with posts in your industry. This helps your profile get seen.

• Consider posting IF it communicates your value (e.g., if you’re in product, show how you built something; if you’re in marketing. Posting is literally a way to market yourself, and it may help you rank higher when people hiring for talent search for your title). More and more startup founders in 2025 are building personal brands on LinkedIn, so no, it’s not cringe.

For certain industries, Twitter may serve a similar purpose (e.g. crypto, VC, etc.)

Required reading/viewing 🥸

• My team is hosting an IRL “intro to speedrun” event at the a16z offices next Wednesday, and we’re inviting students + early career builders to join - apply here to attend!

• From me to you special: why the job is the least important part of your next role.

• The pitch deck Alyx van der Vorm used to raise $14 million for social app Clyx. BI reports that van der Vorm will use some of that to add engineers soon. I’ll keep an eye out for you 👀

• AI evals are a critical skill for AI product builders (says both Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s CPOs). Here’s a video guide on what they are, how to create them, and common mistakes to avoid.

• Is it national 996 month or something? I’ve seen, like, six different headlines about it. So, here’s a quick primer if you’re not working that schedule, and if you are, I’m surprised you have time to read this.

Peace and love to everyone, especially the 996ers. Hope you’re hanging in there.

Ciao!

Jordan

Today’s newsletter is packed with sweet treats:

• An invite to build embodied AI companions

• Plenty of remote jobs

• Two startups with 20+ open jobs

Company spotlight: Tolan

Quinten Farmer sold his fintech company Even to Walmart in 2022 for $300 million. But he and his colleagues were having such a good time, they didn’t want to say goodbye. ❤️

So they created Tolan. What is a Tolan?

• A Tolan is an embodied companion that talks to you like a friend

• Your Tolan looks different than other Tolans

• Over time, your Tolan develops its own personality, an understanding of you, and memories with you

Quinten is currently hiring engineers and product designers. I asked:

Who do you want to hire?

The right person for us is at the intersection of three different circles:

• People who are conceptually interested in what it means to form healthy relationships with AI

• People who want to work on fun consumer stuff. (Turns out it’s really fun to make things for people that just bring them joy)

• People who want to solve fun technical challenges

Your application instructions are so vague! It’s just an email address.

It’s so annoying, right? Our invitation to email is trying to capture people who can send us something interesting: Hey, this is who I am, here’s an interesting thing I’ve done, and here’s why it’s relevant to your company

We’re getting a lot of LLM-generated slop. You really would be better just writing two lines that are clearly from you rather than the pages or paragraphs of LLM generation. That’s what we’re trying to capture: someone who has an interesting point of view, has made something interesting that’s relevant to us, and wants to talk.

Beyond technical skill, anything else you want to see?

Someone who’s really deep on using this incredible new technology in a way that feels authentic and relevant to them. That could be a novelist, that could be a student, that could be an engineer. Many different people can do that, which is what makes this technology so cool.

We hired an intern this summer (and I did not expect to hire an intern) because he had a great cold email. He had made the first AI student body candidate at his high school, a candidate who was 100% LLM generated. He really grappled with a small-scale version of building an LLM system. He wasn’t saying, Hey, I built this thing with millions of users, but he had to think about how to tune a model to express the personality of the candidate.

Open jobs

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research company, which basically means making trustworthy AI systems. They’re hiring for a variety of roles—including biz dev and R&D—in their Telegraph Hill office in SF. They’re also taking general interest applications, so if you’re interested in the mission, it’s worth going for. They announced a $50 million series A earlier this year.

Hybrid AI law firm Crosby is hiring engineers, plus some folks in product, sales, ops, and legal. All jobs are based in their NYC office.

Blacksmith is building a CI cloud from scratch — making GitHub Actions run 2× faster, cheaper, and actually fun. They just pulled in ~$10M (GV backed) and are hiring across Engineering (Product, Systems), GTM (AE, SDR, Ops), and Business Ops. 🚀 Offices in NYC & SF, in-person and hybrid gigs. (their website also has mad drip, respect)

🚨 (REMOTE) - Metalbear 🐻 is making production debugging not just survivable, but actually usable. Their open-source tool, mirrord, lets devs run local processes as if they were inside prod — no redeploys, no breaking teammates. Fortune 500s are already paying up, and now they’re staffing up: Senior Software Engineers, Team Leads, Account Execs (NA + APAC), and Solution Engineers across EMEA, APAC, and beyond. Many of these are remote/global.

Scientific superintelligence platform Lila Sciences has 50 open jobs at their office in Cambridge, MA. They announced a whopping $235 million series A this month and they’re ready to grow, baby, grow.

🚨 (REMOTE) - MagicSchool, the generative-AI platform for schools, has 20 open roles across engineering, product, sales, marketing. And guess what? They’re all ~*~*ReMoTe*~*~

Numeral is taking the dread out of sales tax — think full-stack automation so you never miss a filing or rate change again. They’ve built a platform powering e-commerce & SaaS scale. They’re hiring across engineering, product, growth & ops. Based in SF.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Universal stablecoin platform Mo is hiring remote workers in engineering, product, people ops, and more. A recent $40 million series B brings their total backing to $100 million.

🚨 (HYBRID) - Craft is building a notes/tasks/calendar/docs platform that may someday rival the Schmoogle and Schmicrosoft suites out there. They need new hires in engineering, design, and CX. Most of the Craft team is in Budapest, Hungary, with others scattered around Europe.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Sunrise Robotics, which is building robots for manufacturing, is looking for a slate of engineers, including an AI research engineer and robotics software engineer. They’re also ready for a GTM field project manager. These jobs are remote and work hours are Central European Time +/- 3.

Cardless has built a native credit card infrastructure (think branded credit cards). They need new folks in their SF offices. Cardless already boasts clients like Coinbase, TAP Air Portugal, Qatar Airways, and Alibaba.com. Despite announcing a $60 million series C recently, they run a very lean team.

Paris-based Rayon calls itself the Figma for architectural design. They’re growing their team—currently 15 people—by adding engineers, product leaders, a growth marketer, and a few interns.

Toby talks

I like this outreach tip from James Buckhouse at Outsider Insight:

When cold emailing someone, you only make it to the next step if they give you a “yes” so you need to design your request so that they can say yes to what you are asking. First, let’s look at failure mode:

Don’t ask: Hey you, can you give me a job?
Failure mode: (too much, too soon)

Don’t ask: “Can I pick your brain?”
Failure mode: (ewww gross, waste of time, why? to what end?).

Don’t ask: “Can I be your intern?”
Failure mode: (too much, too soon)

Do ask: 

Dear James Buckhouse, 

I’m researching product development in the AI era and really enjoyed the articles you wrote on Coding Backwards and MCP. I’m interested in learning more about how product and design leaders are implementing these new approaches for their teams and would like to hear more about how you are putting these ideas to work at Sequoia. 

Any chance for a 15 min zoom?    

Required reading

• Dropout’s Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping the internet weird

• What the H1-B changes mean for tech workers

• Jailhouse confessions of a teen hacker

• How bad science is seeping into LLMs

• Uhhhh … Facebook is getting an AI dating assistant?

That’s it for this week… Your totally embodied companion,

Jordan

In fact, I’d argue that the house (eg, the role) is the most interchangeable unit, the least important part of the consequential decision that’s being made. When I took a job at Riot, I figuratively bought myself a “smaller and less comfortable” house than I was previously inhabiting, but that house was on far superior land. I did the same at a16z, where I went from managing a team of ~70 to managing a team of no one.

The street is your team. These are the people you interact with every day, the ones who make work feel energizing or draining. This includes your manager. The street really is important. You need to live on a street where you like your neighbors. Having a manager I respected and who respected me was one of the most advantageous arrangements I’ve ever experienced at work (s/o to my guy Danker).

The neighborhood is the product group or division you sit inside. A great house on a street full of friendly neighbors can still be tough if the neighborhood has no grocery store, poor schools, or constant construction. In the same way, you can love your role and team but feel boxed in if your product group has no momentum or resources. If you work in a big company, and your product group is losing, you are also losing. When I reflect on my time at Riot, this would have been a team like Legends of Runeterra. No shade, they tried their hardest and made a game for players, and to critical acclaim, but it was a commercial failure. There is no other way to put it. You do not want to be on the team that is bonfiring dollars.

The city is the company. Its culture, brand, and leadership determine whether you feel proud to live there, whether outsiders see it as thriving, and whether there is long term investment in infrastructure. The team might be amazing. The job might be amazing. But the company might have just been purchased by a PE firm that is certain to put extreme pressure on generating margins, squeezing every dollar out of their investment, likely at the expense of your upward mobility or income potential. Or… the company might have just raised billions of dollars, or have a product that is just raining high margin profits, and the money is flowing like water over the Niagara falls. You want to be in the latter context. Raises, promotions, resources… they all abound. This is how you get your house on the beach.

Then there is the state, which is the broader industry you are in. You could be in the nicest city imaginable, but if the entire state is in decline, opportunities shrink and property values fall. A stellar role in a strong company will not feel the same if the industry as a whole is consolidating, commoditizing, or shrinking. When I got into the gaming industry at 25 (13 years ago!!!), the entire industry was expanding at a rapid clip - I was very much in the right state. But now, the industry is facing a bit more complexity, and it’s not entirely clear I’d move to this state in 2025.

Beyond the state there is the literal country. This is the macro environment: the economy, regulation, geography, and even global perception. You may be in the right industry and company, but if the country itself is experiencing political instability, major economic downturns, or restrictive policies, growth becomes harder no matter how strong the local layers are… No matter how hard you work, or what company you choose, if you decide to work for an EU-based company right now, you are accepting a likely lesser-degree of upward potential. You may want to live in Canada, and that’s fine, but Canada graduates unicorns at a fraction of the rate of the US, etc.

Just as living in a thriving neighborhood in a struggling country can feel precarious, working in the best possible company in a difficult macro environment will shape your career in ways you cannot ignore.

The lesson: do not just evaluate the house. The role is the LEAST important of all of the layers. It is the most mutable. Invert the decision-making process. Decide on your country, then your state, then your city, and so on.

It’s a short email today. Straight to the jobs. See ya’ next week!

Yours,

Jordan

Company spotlight: Graphite

Here’s a meta kind of company for software engineers (like, the OG meaning of meta, not Zuck Meta). Graphite has built a developer tool for code review. They’ve also developed a chat tool to let you make changes instantly. They’re hiring right now, with a bunch of open positions in their NYC and SF offices, including an AI engineer, a frontend engineer, and someone for developer relations (a cool opportunity for you extroverts)

Perks include:

• Paid lunch, dinner, and coffee during the week

• 16 weeks parental leave

• Quarterly hacking weeks so you actually have time to code

Want in? See a tip for nailing cold outreach from one of Graphite’s recruiters below.

Open jobs

Tennr, which makes medical referrals quick and easy, just raised a $18M Series A. They’re hiring engineers, sales, product designers, marketing (etc…) in NYC (Chelsea) to build out the platform that helps doctors send and receive referrals instantly instead of drowning in faxes and phone calls.

Hello Patient, which uses conversational AI to take over voice, SMS, and chat so healthcare practices never miss a patient, just raised $22.5M in Series A led by Scale Venture Partners. They’re hiring across engineering, marketing (including a “Vibe Marketer” / Product Marketing Lead), operations, and product roles in Austin and remote

Eudia, which announced its $105 million series A 👀 earlier this year, needs a bunch of engineers in places like Dublin, Palo Alto, and Bengaluru (India). The startup builds augmented intelligence (AI!) solutions for legal teams.

Event infrastructure company CrowdVolt is looking for a founding engineer. Co-founder Max Hammer invites you to slide directly into his DMs.

Runware, which powers ultra-fast, low-cost generative media via its Sonic Inference Engine (one API for image/video and more), just raised a $13M seed led by Insight Partners. They’re hiring Developer Evangelists across multiple geos.

🚨 (REMOTE) - TollBit, which lets you monitor and block bot traffic to your website, is hiring a REMOTE backend engineer.

With their $120 million series A 👀, DYNA robotics is looking for seven engineers in Redwood City, CA. Most of these roles start at $180K.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Pogo, which lets consumers monetize their own data, needs a REMOTE fullstack data engineer. They’re also accepting general applications for “AI tinkerers” and other people who have weird ideas for what they can do there. (Did we mention they’re offering $1,500 to trick out your home office and extra $$ to consult with a tax lawyer?)

Anterior, a clinical AI platform, needs an engineering manager, a forward deployed engineer, and a tech staffer (apply if you: have a passion for doing things The Right Way, you believe Less is More) at their NYC offices. They have a $20 million series A.

Vizcom needs a staff software engineer. Vizcom is building a platform that lets industrial engineers create photorealistic renderings of … well, things. Check out the Interview Process (fast; no leetcode) and 90-day outcome expectations.

🚨 (REMOTE) - Bluefish is building a platform that lets brands figure out what tools like ChatGPT and Claude are saying about their brand. They’re looking for engineers in NYC and Berlin, including a director of engineering in NYC. The company notes that it’s flexible about hybrid work in NYC, and can do REMOTE in Berlin.

Parahelp, an AI support agency for software companies, is recruiting for several founding positions in SF, all requiring a minimum of three years of experience—great for more junior engineers! They sponsor visas. 📋

Dust lets users build custom AI agents fast. They’re looking for a software engineer and a frontend engineer. They hit $2 million ARR last year and are planning to 5x by EOY.

Good times: Roblox wants to pay you to build virtual worlds. Early career software engineers need apply (in San Mateo, CA).

Required reading

• African Next Voices is bringing together linguists and computer scientists to build LLMs of African languages, which have largely been left out of AI data sets.

• Syria is building its own Silicon Valley to “reboot” the country’s economy.

• Robot lawnmowers have been unleashed on innocent human and avian citizens of New York.

👨🏻‍💻 Honestly, a week feels like too long to go without you, but that’s what makes our time together even sweeter.

I love you,

xoxoxo Jordan

PS. Don’t forget to apply to the a16z talent network. Representatives are standing by to review your application.

Today we're talking equity: Why it's having a moment, how to get your fair share, and why you should never stop asking for more.

Also, you could be a software engineer at a seafood startup that is decidedly not Red Lobster. Let your inner-Poseidon reign.

Besos,

Jordan 😘

A Quick Note About SPEEDRUN…

Founders, it’s time. a16z speedrun’s upcoming Winter/Spring cohort (SR006) runs from late January through April 2026, with applications open now through September 28 at 11:59 PM PT. Secure up to $1M for your startup by applying today.

All about equity

I asked fellow recruiter Jeremy McLeod - who has recruited for startups like Albert and Builder.io - about what people often get wrong about equity and how they can get the % they want.

Why applicants should care

Previously, you had to wait five to seven years for some liquidity event where the company might get purchased or IPO. Now secondary sales for foundational employees have reached peaks we’ve never seen before.

It should always be on the table

You should not be taking any foundational role in a tech company without equity. If a company isn’t offering, you’d have to ask yourself why they don’t want your outcome linked to business.

What’s fair …

Ask people in your network: What do you see as typical in going for equity for this type of role? Here’s some of the parameters of the business. What do you think I should be asking for? Reach out to a recruiter. Say: “I’m going to be negotiating for this role. What have you seen recently?”

Cash vs. equity?

Early career, salary tends to be pretty important. As roles become more senior, compensation mix starts leaning more toward long-term incentives like equity. Understand where your risk appetite is on salary vs. equity. Most startups will negotiate on a sliding scale. If equity is more important to you, let them know. Companies love to know that equity is the most important thing to you because it says you’re attaching yourself to the mission.

(ps, note from me, jordan: when I joined Riot, I told them I wanted less equity and more base. Then, when I got promoted, I told them the same thing. Now, after having been through the other side of the Riot acquisition, I can assure you that was the W R O N G choice!!!)

Not all equity is created equal

There’s equity, then there’s equity. There’s equity with companies that have got tier 1 founders and tier 1 backers. If they’re involved with those tier 1 VCs, that equity may well be much more valuable than a higher percentage in a company where the traction or the trajectory is not necessarily as great.

You get another shot

Equity is not a one-and-done situation. You always have time to get new grants. If you are a great employee in a business, they will give you more equity without you asking. You don’t have to nail it in the first conversation. Equity is just like salary in terms of negotiation - every time you have a salary conversation, you should be including equity as well.

¡One more bonus tip!

Understand triggers. It used to be that you had a year to exercise equity after you left the business. Now we see five years, seven years. Understand not just the percentage, but how often does it vest? What are the cliffs? Is it a consistent percentage?

many j.o.b.s.

Bonfire Studios, the Irvine-based game studio from ex-Blizzard vets, is building a brand-new multiplayer game. They’re backed by Riot and a16z, and hiring artists, producers, sound designers, a social media lead, etc. Check out their jobs here.

Starcloud is putting data centers in space (??). With their $10 million seed, they’re placing several engineers in the far more terrestrial location of Redmond, Washington. Unfortunately, you will have to stay grounded for these jobs.

🚨 REMOTE job alert! Tempo has made 1) blockchain for payments, and 2) a mesmerizing website. They’re super early stages and are hiring a number of roles including engineering, marketing, design, gtm, and more.

Teton, with its brand new $20 million series A, is hiring a bunch of engineers in Copenhagen, including a 3D vision engineer, a Reactive Native mobile engineer. Teton is developing really cool tools for healthcare professionals, including eldercare providers. A very worthwhile mission.

Endex, which is building an Excel-native AI for financial modeling and analysis, raised its $14 million seed in August. They’re looking for engineers and other tech-types at its NYC offices. P.S. Their job descriptions are refreshingly brief.

Enterprise resource planning platform Keel needs a technical product specialist and a frontend product engineer in London. 💂‍♀️ Their careers page lays out the interview process in detail! Worth taking a look if you want to give it a go.

SafetyKit makes agentic AI for risk and compliance. They’re searching for engineers in its SF offices. They announced a $27 million series A earlier this year.

Shinkei is bringing back … American seafood? Ya know what? Why the hell not. I fucking love a scallop. They’re hiring for a bunch of positions (including a “Wildcard Engineer”). The team is based in El Segundo, CA.

Construction platform Miter needs engineers in NYC and SF. Perks include fully paid medical, unlimited PTO, and 16 weeks of parental leave (for foster and adoptive parents too).

Casca needs your help processing business loans with AI. This is actually a super powerful part of the country’s economic engine. Lots of cool jobs in SF here, including a head of engineering ($250–$250K) and a senior forward deployed engineer (starting at $180K).

🚨 REMOTE job alert! Renewable energy project management company Euclid is looking for a REMOTE senior fullstack software engineer. They have a hot, fresh $20 million series A!

Toby Talks

Self-help for jobseekers: try a little context engineering. That’s the art of giving AI the right background info to turn ChatGPT (or other answer engine) into your personal resume optimizer and interview prep buddy. Feed it the job description and your background, and watch it craft responses that actually hit different. Just remember to add your own voice to the output so it doesn't sound like every other AI-generated application.

Required reading

• I made this little tool to help job seekers find jobs that aren’t posted on LinkedIn. It’s super simple to use. Check it out.

• Skill Up launched This Week in Video Games late this summer. Has anyone been reading? Thoughts? Feelings? Prayers?

• All of Apple’s new hardware that was announced this week.

• A piece to ponder from The Verge: Is vibe coding the end of software engineering?

👨🏻‍💻 Thanks for coming to see me. Ya te extraño.

An extra-long list of open jobs this week, plus 3️⃣ stealth startups low-key searching for someone like you.

xoxo,

Jordan

Company spotlight: Artisan

AI won’t put software engineers out of a job, but they will be called to build the workforce of the future. Artisan, backed with a $25 million series A, is building a squad of AI agents to handle the boring bits. The company stirred up quite a bit of controversy with its Stop Hiring Humans billboards, yet they’re very much hiring humans. They’ve got a dozen open engineering roles, many of them REMOTE 🚨.

The CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack admits the billboards were just a little stunt to get people riled up. In fact, he told TechCrunch that “human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content.” Seeeeeeee?! I told you.

This is your chance to be a part of something weird, and a little contradictory—and a little dangerous!

Fresh j.o.b.s.

PACT founder Skye Bork is looking for a founding engineer with spike and/or AI experience to join her startup that connects patients with clinical trials and helps them manage the process. She started the company after losing her father to glioblastoma and wants someone equally committed to making healthcare better. Email Skye directly at skye@pact-ai.com.

GTM analytics startup Equals is hiring a software engineer to join their founding team in NYC. Salary range is $180K–$250K.

French startup Amo is building a new kind of social app for building deeper relationships, not more of them. Quality over-quantity, ya know? Six engineering roles are open in their trés cool Paris offices.

Open-access AI cloud company Hyperbolic has five open engineering roles in the SF offices. To apply, email contact@hyperbolic.xyz with your background and how you heard about the company (that would be me).

Sauron home security is hiring for a bunch of cool roles, including camera integration engineer and senior perception software engineer. The founding team has quite the pedigree, including Eventbrite co-founder, Hims & Hers co-founder, and research engineer at robot taxi company Zoox.

Hook needs a London-based software engineer and a product designer for their customer growth/revenue prediction platform. Perks include a hybrid schedule and private health insurance.

Digital threat cybersecurity startup Outtake needs engineers at its Brooklyn offices. Enjoy flexible PTO and 100% covered medical, vision, and dental. 😬

Copper, “the Tesla of induction stoves,” needs an embedded systems engineer at its Berkeley HQ. A rare software job in a hardware world.

🚨 Stride, the portable benefits platform for indie workers, needs a REMOTE full-stack engineer. Comp is $171K–$186K + equity.

Avalanche makes micro-fusion reactors, which means something really smart. They’re looking for a smarty-pants plasma physics code director (think C++ and Python) to work with them in Seattle.

Enterprise sustainability platform Watershed is looking for a bunch of engineers in … Mexico City, SF, London, and NYC. No bad options there. The hiring process is: 1–2 convos about the company, experience interview/skills eval, then virtual panel interview.

Hanomi is building AI for mechanical engineers who want to go “3D to 2D in minutes.” They need an AI senior product engineer and a full-stack product engineer. The team splits time between Bangalore and SF, so ask about relocation assistance.

Invite-only sublet platform Kiki is looking for their founding engineer based in their London offices in Shoreditch. They will sponsor UK visas! App instructions are at the end of their founder’s “hiring manifesto.”

Toby Talks

It’s tempting to apply to every open role, but it’s not a great look. "Spray and pray is a recipe for burnout and disappointment. The best candidates aren't just applying to jobs; they're solving for the company's specific needs before they even get an interview." — Mindy East, HR leader and career coach

I have my own take on this: limit yourself to applying to 1-2 roles per company. Most recruiters in a given company are able to see all of your current and past applications. If you are applying to many different types of roles, this will signal a lack of clarity and depth, making recruiters wonder if you have depth in any of the disciplines you’ve applied for.

Stealth jobs 🥷

Maybe you prefer to fly under the radar? Serve enigma energy to your public persona? Try these stealth startups.

Manish Agrawal (ex-Microsoft, ex-Google) is in stealth with “a company at the intersection of AI and digital marketing. He needs a founding engineer.

Ali Fozooni is building “an AI-agentic product to shake up a massive industry” and needs a founding engineer to help. You can DM Ali on LinkedIn.

Main character mystery moment for these two MIT grads who are “reimagining a massive productivity software category with AI and have raised $7M+ from Tier 1 investors.” DM Sudhanshu Mishra on LinkedIn for more info or to submit referrals (and collect a $25K bonus).

MORE job hunting tip(s)

This CNET article on how to get hired has some little gems. Here are my favorites:

• Be choosy. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to job searching.

• AlwaysBeReady. You know this, of course. That’s why you read job hunting sux. But it’s good practice to be ready to apply as quickly as possible and get seen first.

• NetTWerk. If you’re job searching, start talking. A strong referral is gold in the startup world, so tell people you’re looking. Actually, you can tell me directly by applying to the a16z talent network and I’ll make the net-twerk for you.

Maybe you’re not looking for a job, maybe you’re looking for a co-founder?

My a16z speedrun colleagues put together this cool Substack on how 40 successful founders found their cofounders—the Thelma to their Louise (skipping the grim ending but keeping the young Brad Pitt energy).

Among the highlights:

• Besties from school and work are the most popular future co-founders

• Finding the right co-founder is a little like dating, and it helps to see how they work before diving in

• Hitting someone up on LinkedIn also works to find a co-founder, so beef up your profile if you want to be discovered

So, as you’re looking for your next startup job, maybe don’t rule out the C-suite.

Required reading

Here’s your tea 🫖. Here’s your blanket. Here are five things you should read this week.

• Tech journalist Joanna Stern is spending a year letting AI take over her life in every way possible. She’s documenting it here.

• Apparently you can run your own LLM on your laptop now?

• Scientists may have solved the problem of topological qubits in quantum computing. We’re truly living in the future.

• There’s a giant scavenger hunt taking place in San Francisco.

• The 10 European startups that became unicorns in 2025 (including Lovable :)

👨🏻‍💻 Thanks for reading. OK, byeeeeee.

PS: Apply to the a16z talent network. We look at every application. Like, really.

Today’s newsletter is full of tiny, juicy nuggets: a junior-level engineering job, a smattering of REMOTE jobs, and a call for a developer evangelist.

Company spotlight: Wispr Flow

As someone who is prone to developing a wicked case of carpal tunnel syndrome, I am more than ready for Wispr Flow, whose mission is to make the best, most effortless speech-to-text app around. This isn’t mere dictation, Wispr Flow is meant to make working as easy as talking. It’s there to catch your mistakes and stop you from sounding so rambly.

The list of use cases is oh-so long. Think email writing and project management, yes, but also *~*~CoDinG~*~* (lol we all know engineers are not ditching their mechanical clackers for this but we can all dream!)

Wispr Flow announced its $30 million series A in June and boasts a list of users that includes NVIDIA, Meta, Substack, Amazon, and Perplexity.

They’ve got a lot of open jobs right now, including a developer evangelist (🙏 amen) and a VP of engineering.

In their words:

• HQ in San Francisco

• Open to remote

• Visa-friendly

• Don’t see a role that fits? Email us your resume at careers@wisprflow.ai

Open j.o.b.s

AI evaluation platform LMArena, with $100M in seed funding, is hiring in San Francisco. Founded by UC Berkeley SkyLab researchers, the company runs an open leaderboard where LLMs compete anonymously and users vote on the best responses. They’re looking for backend, full stack, and frontend engineers to help scale their platform.

Recruiting platform Paraform, with $25 million in total backing, is looking for a product-minded software engineer to work in SF. Just two years of full stack experience required. Hiring range is $120K–$230K + equity. They’re also hiring across marketing, sales, and operations.

Personal finance management app Copilot is looking for a head of engineering and an iOS/Mac product designer in NYC, and a handful of engineering roles in Santiago, Chile. Copilot has won a bunch of Apple design and app awards in the last few years. They’re making something really popular.

AI-native marketing automation platform Conversion, who just closed their $28 million series A, is looking for a backend software engineer (starting at $150K) and an infrastructure software engineer (starting at $200K), both at their SF HQ.

🚨ENTRY-LEVEL job alert. Enterprise web agent TinyFish (backed with a new $47 million series A. Wowza.) has eight engineering roles open in their Palo Alto offices (some can be REMOTE). In particular, they’re looking for an entry-level ML engineer. No job descriptions on these roles, so go wild.

Paris-based custom page builder startup Prismic is looking for a REMOTE software engineer based in Europe, and have a handful of other opportunities in revenue, product, and operations Très chic!

🚨 REMOTE job alert. Firecrawl, which turns websites into LLM-ready data, is looking for engineers. These can be hybrid roles at the SF offices or REMOTE. Comp starts at $150K + 0.1%–0.3% equity.

HappyRobot builds AI workers. Only they need human workers like you to do that. They have SIXTEEN open engineering roles in locations like Madrid (Madrid!!! Spend your doll hairs at Chocolatería San Ginés, you won’t be sorry), Chicago, and SF. Some are on-site, some are hybrid, and some are remote.

AI-native investment bank OffDeal is hiring a product lead and a handful of engineers at its NYC offices. Most start at $180K and roughly 0.1%–0.5% (based on seniority).

🚨 REMOTE job alert. Spellbook is hiring “Olympic-level team members” for REMOTE jobs in Canada. They need…a product engineer, a senior software engineer, and a software engineering manager/technical lead.

E-commerce growth platform Redo is hiring for jobs in Draper, Utah. Among the perks: on-site gym with pickle ball courts, weekly lunches, and $100/month babysitting reimbursement.

Piping Hot Networking Tip

I love this hack from my esteemed colleague Macy Mills. Make a QR code that links to your LinkedIn profile (or Github or portfolio) and set it as your phone background. That way you can quickly direct new connections to your work.

Other Job Search Platforms

Guess what - there are a lot of places to look for jobs. My goal is to help you, so I want you to know about them. Here’s a quick list of VC / Startup job boards / newsletters that you should check out:

VC JOB AGGREGATORS

• Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) - https://portfoliojobs.a16z.com/jobs

• Index Ventures - https://www.indexventures.com/startup-jobs

• General Catalyst - https://jobs.generalcatalyst.com/companies

• Khosla Ventures - https://jobs.khoslaventures.com/jobs

• Sequoia - https://jobs.sequoiacap.com/jobs/

• Greylock Partners - https://jobs.greylock.com/jobs

• Kleiner Perkins - https://jobs.kleinerperkins.com/jobs

• BITKRAFT - https://careers.bitkraft.vc/jobs

• Accel Ventures - https://jobs.accel.com/companies

• YCombinator - https://www.workatastartup.com/

• Contrary Capital - https://jobs.contrary.com/jobs

• Pear - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pear

• Battery Ventures - https://jobs.battery.com/jobs

• New Enterprise Associates (NEA) - https://careers.nea.com/jobs

• Antler - https://careers.antler.co/jobs

• Lightspeed Venture Partners - https://jobs.lsvp.com/jobs

• Bessemer Venture Partners - https://jobs.bvp.com/jobs

JOBS NEWSLETTERS

• Ali Rohde Jobs - https://alirohdejobs.substack.com/

• next play - https://nextplayso.substack.com/

• Nonlinear Techies - https://careerhannah.substack.com/

• Beyond Bay St. - https://beyondbayst.substack.com/

• Why You Should Join - https://whyyoushouldjoin.substack.com/

• Web Of Jobs - https://webofjobs.substack.com/

VC FELLOWSHIPS / TALENT NETWORKS

• a16z College Talent - https://a16z.com/connect/college-talent/

• Neo Scholars - https://neo.com/scholars

• Pear Fellows - https://pear.vc/programs/dorm/fellows/

• Kleiner Perkins Fellows - https://www.kleinerperkins.com/fellows/

• General Catalyst talent network - https://jobs.generalcatalyst.com/talent-network

That’s it for this week!

👨🏻‍💻 Thanks for reading. I love you. Bacon says 🐾.

PS: Apply to the a16z talent network and real human beings with real human being eyeballs will look at your resume and match you to a startup.

…I hope Google translate didn’t do me dirty on that one. Ngl - I don’t speak french.

Today’s newsletter includes an interview with a non-tech founder who needed techies to grow his business. Plus junior engineering roles and a startup with 100+ open jobs!

Interview with a founder

Jamie Hodari is one of the brains behind Industrious, a rare brick-and-mortar startup that blew up. (Why yes, they are hiring!) Industrious was acquired by corporate real estate giant CBRE in January 2025—but they kept Jamie because he’s a smarty pants (in a good way).

Four years in, Jamie needed engineers. The first tech hires in a non-tech company get a lot of autonomy, a lot of freedom, and a lot of trust. A pretty swish set up.

Your first engineers were building …

We provide workplaces, so we needed a website to convert leads and we needed an internal employee platform.

But thennnnnnnn … for people to actually physically navigate the space, they need an amazing app that knows where they are and knows what rooms are available and knows what they’re about to book. You have this moment where you’re like, technology isn’t an enabler of the product. It is a fundamental part of the product.

It was an exciting time!

When you’re not a native technology company, it’s like, Holy shit. We can get to something we’re really excited with from two months of testing on the digital side, when it might take two years of testing on the physical side.

What did you need to hear from your first engineers?

You just know you’re vulnerable going in as the non-technical CEO. They can tell you, I’m so sorry, but this thing is going to take a year and a half. But you have a relatively limited ability to call bullshit.

Having absolute ironclad trust that the person’s not going to bullshit you and that their motivations are going to come from the right place is really important.

Yeah but how do you, like … know know?

I recall certain impressive technology-leader types, where every story they told me was how their boss was an idiot and they were the hero who saved the day. It was so important to have people who are like, I really fucked this up, or, there’s stuff I’m better at than the average engineer, but here’s stuff I’m way worse at.

When people BS you, it’s not purely trickery and obfuscation. It’s that they don’t have the self-awareness to understand what they’re good and bad at. I needed to detect honestly and self-awareness.

Company spotlight: Anterior

Last week I told all y’all entry-level and junior engineers to not panic. Gentle folx of the jury, I present more receipts in this petite company spotlight.

Meet Anterior, the company using AI to streamline healthcare admin and making life easier for providers. They’re hiring at their NYC HQ, btw.

This is what they have to say:

We’re hiring from infra to frontend, there is room all the way up and down the stack. Come share your proudest firefighting story with us in an interview, bring your GitHub, and let’s see if we’re a good fit.

If you’re a junior passionate about coding and hacking: it’s always ok to apply, shoot us a link to some of your work and let’s talk anyway.

SEEEEE! I told you. Now go get ’em.

Open j.o.b.s. for y.o.u.

Collaborative code editor Zed is looking for Rust engineers and open source engineers for remote jobs in U.S. or EU time zones.

Healthcare infrastructure platform Junction is hiring REMOTE engineers (including a head of engineering). Check out their open jobs + their 2025 hiring plan to see what’s coming up. They also publish the stages of their recruiting process on their site.

Ambrook, backed by a $26.1 million series A, is building financial tools for indie and small businesses—our economic backbone! The demand is definitely there. See their open jobs. They’re HYBRID and based in NYC, Denver, or SF. Clear role expectations are spelled out here. A huge plus.

🤖 ROBOTS! Matic makes a de ouf-as-hell robotic floor cleaner, named by WIRED as the best automatic robot vacuum they’ve tested. Stylé! Or, should I say, vrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmm. All open jobs are based in their Mountain View, CA, office.

Ivo is making contract negotiation less headache-y on an enterprise scale. With their $16 million series A, Ivo is hiring engineers at their SF HQ.

Dev tools startup Trunk is looking for a full stack engineer (on site in SF) and a DevRel engineer (remote). Fun fact: Trunk likes to minimize meetings so you actually have time to code.

Power, which connects patients with new therapies and treatments via clinical trials, is hiring for a bunch of cool positions, like engineers (of all stripes), data leads, and product designers.

Basic Capital is building a 401(k) for the modern world. They need a full stack backend and a full stack frontend. Both are $180K–$200K + equity.

🚨 SURGE HIRING ALERT. Biz financial ops platform Ramp has 100+ open jobs right now. Holy Baloney. I see … data! I see product design! Backend! Frontend! GTM! Mobile! Infrastructure! I see remote! I see hybrid! I see you … thriving!

SPEEDRUN JOBS!

Austin Chen (Berkeley, Apple, TikTok, SPC), founder of Marlo (SR004), says “Marlo is a small but mighty team working in person to reshape how the creator economy operates.” He’s hiring engineers for their SF office.

The team over at Sonatic (SR005) went viral earlier this week with this post - they’re offering generous startup salaries, housing, and a free Raya subscription to boot. They’re also offering a “$20k-$25k” referral bonus. They also work 7 days a week. You can reach cofounder Kinjal via kinjal@sonatic.co

Tabish Ahmed (Google, Youtube, Meta), founder of Playroom (SR003), is searching for someone who is terminally online, plugged into creator culture, and who can lead their influencer marketing efforts. You can email Tabish via tabish@joinplayroom.com

The team at Bins (SR005), led by Akshay Raj (Rice, Anduril, Susquehanna), is working on a new social shopping experience. They’re looking for founding software + growth engineers. Email them via team@joinbins.com if you’re interested.

The Darwin team, led by Sanjit Juneja (UT Austin), is “building a new generation of AI-native UGC media platforms — starting with Wayve, our flagship AI video remixing platform.” They’re hiring ML engineers, a Chief Scientist, an iOS eng, and a few others based in their SF office.

Crater Studios (SR002) wants to “reimagine how AAA games are built… by combining a world-class team with deeply integrated AI workflows.” They’re hiring for several remote roles.

Founders Anthony Azrak + Jai Mansukhani of OpenSesame are building the “LUI” - the language user interface to modernize antiquated SaaS apps. They’re also hiring a founding AI engineer based in Toronto.

Brian Yun, founder of Endo Health (SR003), has a crystalline vision: “building voice AI to increase human lifespan by at least a year.” He’s the right guy to do it - he is, after all, a medical doctor with a CS degree. He’s looking for TikTok growth wizards and smart builders to join him at his SF office - you can reach him via brian@endohealth.ai

🚨 Don’t forget: This newsletter isn’t the only place you can find très cool tech jobs in the world’s sexiest startups. Apply to the a16z talent network and let me be your matchmaker.

That’s it for this issue… see ya next week!

Bises et xoxo,

Jordan

It’s me, Jordan.

Today’s newsletter goes out to all the entry level engineers feeling crushed by the job market. I am not going to tell you it’s easy, but I am going to wrap you in a 1980s cable knit and tell you it’s gonna be okay. I know it’s 90 degrees outside. Just GO WITH IT.

Is entry-level really dead? 🔪

The news these days is ugly and has many junior engineers feeling like they’ll never get their break. You’ve read it: AI is killing entry level work and all that.

But as a recruiter, I know some things. Actually, you know what, I’m going to back myself: There’s a reason I get paid to do this. I know a lot of things. Here are three of them.

1) I recruit junior engineers all the time. (Just apply to the a16z talent network and see.)

2) I also know that most founders aren’t set on having someone with three or five or eight years of work experience. Mostly, founders want talented people who will throw themselves into the work. Don’t believe me? I have receipts!

3) Among the founders I have interviewed for this newsletter, exactly zero of them have said work experience is what they want. What they do want is skills and work ethic.

“I think being a team player is all it comes down to. It’s about having that shared drive to chase after the mission and encouraging the other people that you work with to join you in that journey.”

—Selin Kocalar, cofounder and COO at Delve

“I’ve never stopped trying to find engineers who just get joy from building the future. The best engineers—true engineers—that I love working with are people who just get joy from building the future.”

—Tigran Sloyan, cofounder and CEO at CodeSignal

“I gravitate towards candidates that tell me who they are and what they’re all about way more than a resume.”

—Piotr Tomasik, co-founder and COO at TensorWave

And when I asked Meter’s CEO Anil Varanasi whether he prefers enthusiasm or experience in a new hire, he said…“Can I say neither? We look for colleagues that have an abundant level of kindness and ambition.”

See? Toldja.

Jobs for you

Lots of new jobs for you this fine day, many of them good for junior and early career engineers. Ya welcome!

Silna Health, which streamlines treatment approvals for healthcare providers, is looking for a software engineer at its NYC office. No specific years of experience required - just skills and capabilities.

Codeless end-to-end governance system Agora is hiring REMOTE engineers to work US-friendly hours. Agora does not list years of experience under requirements either. Show them what you can do, baby!

Recruitment platform Paraform, with their $20 million series A, is looking for a software engineer with just 2 years of experience.

“Digital clone” company Delphi, backed by a $16 million series A, is looking for engineers to work in their SF HQ. Note that Delphi doesn’t list years of experience in their requirements, and the backend product engineer and infrastructure engineer roles could be a good fit for junior-level folks.

Perle, which is helping improve AI model accuracy, is looking for a remote full stack blockchain engineer. In their words: “Titles, tenure, and pedigree don’t matter - impact does.”

AI infrastructure startup is Modal is hiring for several engineering roles, among them frontend engineers with just 2 years of experience

➡️ These roles not quite right for you? Be a friend and forward it on!

Edia, AI platform for grade school classrooms, is looking for senior engineers in their SF or NYC offices. Salaries start at $200K.

Next-gen banking platform Dakota is looking for engineers (back-end, compliance, and growth). The positions are REMOTE and can be based in the US, Canada, Spain, or Portugal. Hiring ranges start at $130K or $140K.

Ethos, which builds autonomous agents for PE firms, hedge funds, and consultancies, is looking for an AI engineer in London.

SPEEDRUN JOBS!

Did I mention that speedrun005 kicked off a few weeks back? The cohort is in full swing, and many of the current and graduated teams are hiring…

The team at Coverd (sr004) announced a $7.8M raise yesterday. When I asked cofounders Albert Wang & Eric Xu how I should describe the team, they wrote: “Coverd is the ultimate fintech platform for DEGENS and beyond.” They’re hiring out of their NYC office.

Bead AI (sr005) believes that SOX compliance can be done a better way. We agree with them. The team is hiring a founding auditor to help make sure the pesky robots don’t get out of line

There’s a special place in my heart for the Lil’ Snack (sr002) team. I worked w/ cofounder Travis Chen in an earlier life - he’s both brilliant and an incredible human - and cofounder / ceo Eric Berman is a wellspring of energy and positivity. They want to bring short-form games to every platform, and are well on their way after partnerships with Hasbro + Buzzfeed. They’re looking for a BD / partnerships lead.

Put simply, Sunflower (sr004) helps people quit any addiction - and they’re growing fast (70% MoM!). If you want to do good in this world, you should join founder Koby Conrad’s team and the Sunflower mission. He’s searching for a Founding Product Designer who can work from either San Francisco or Buenos Aires.

Israeli-based Argu (sr005) is combining AI with video to improve surveillance and safety outcomes. Imagine natural language interfaces + CCTV footage (“find everyone wearing a red shirt”). They’re hiring a VP of Engineering - someone with computer vision + AI infra xp. Email join@argu.ai to let the team know if you’re interested.

Mara (sr004) builds autonomous combat-ready robots that train by playing video games. They're looking for nonstop, obsessive builders ready to commit to the mission: defending the free world with more robots than soldiers. They’re hiring a “Nueromancer” and a “Wargamer” to work out of their SF office.

Dini Mullaji, founder of Sitch (sr004), knows what we all know: modern online dating sucks. Her team is aiming to fix that by using LLMs to create highly curated matches. She wrote me saying “we’re looking for someone to lead partnerships and grow our ambassador presence city by city. You’ll build creator and brand relationships that drive growth (from Barry’s to Equinox to alumni clubs to Chainsmokers concerts)…” You can find the job description here.

Cool stuff people made

I like when people are smart. You know, smart like you. Here are some cool things that smart people are making and doing right now.

• A software developer wrote this guide about how he uses Claude Code to do, like, everything.

• This list of essential reading for product builders by Lenny Rachitsky.

• The Video Game History Foundation has digitized all of Computer Entertainer, a 1980s gaming magazine, and made it available for free. *Squeals in 8-bit*

Send me cool things you’ve made too. I want to see them.

Chronicle of an interview foretold

Next week we’ll hear from a startup founder who made a successful $800 million exit in January. He’ll tell us how to get a tech job in a non-tech startup - and how sweet that setup can be.

I meant it when I said I want to help you find a job. Apply to the a16z talent network. Real people look at your application. Real people match you to open jobs.

👨🏻‍💻OK ILY bye.

Today’s edition comes straight from my heart. There’s an exclusive with CodeSignal’s CEO (containing a word of hope for everyone feeling some kinda way about vanishing tech jobs), plus direct email addresses for sending your applications. And a story about bunnies.

Feeling lonely in your job search? 💔 Invite me into your heart. Apply to the a16z talent network and real people with real beating hearts will look at what you send us and find good matches for you.

Company Spotlight: CodeSignal

The year was 2015. Justin Bieber just released “What Do You Mean?” Market sentiment was deteriorating. Yet Google couldn’t put butts in seats fast enough.

Tigran Sloyan, who was at Google then, knew a lot of really talented engineers. But they weren’t getting called for interviews because they didn’t have the typical Harvard/Cal Tech/MIT pedigree that recruiters and managers drool over. (okay, he does have that, but he’s also a gentleman!!!)

He wanted to give those engineers a chance. So he started CodeSignal.

The technical skills assessment platform raised their seed in early 2015 and their series A in late 2016. They’re currently post–series C with fewer than 200 people (that’s very deliberate on Tigran’s part).

Since CodeSignal started by helping engineers get discovered by startups - and because they’re hiring right now - I thought I’d ask Tigran, the co-founder and CEO, about what he looks for in an engineer.

Tell me what it was like to hire your first engineers for CodeSignal?

It was more about who’s willing to take a chance on us and who’s got the skills. Over time, I’ve realized that it’s a combination of skill and attitude. Early stage companies aren’t for everyone. It’s a lot of chaos, it’s a lot of risk, and a lot of very long days. The biggest plus is that it’s more rewarding, it’s more fun, and you get to have more ownership.

A lot of people cast themselves as wanting the risk of a startup. How do you know if it’s true?

I would ask, ‘Okay, when have you worked extremely hard? What did that look like for you? Walk me through it.’ You’ll be shocked by the type of responses you get. Some people would describe a normal eight-hour day, and others would describe not sleeping for three days💀.

So, do you hire differently now?

I personally still like to stay on the side of people who like to build things and move fast.

I’ve never stopped trying to find engineers who just get joy from building the future. The best engineers—true engineers—that I love working with are people who just get joy from building the future.

What’s really hard to find right now?

The combination of someone who has the right attitude and the drive is very good technically, is able to be product-minded, understand design, user stories, and product management. That’s harder to find.

I want to work for you. Tell me how to stand out at CodeSignal.

It always starts with skills. Sometimes people say, “Oh, hard those skills don’t matter anymore as much as fungible soft skills.” Those are important, but if you can’t do the job, soft skills don’t really make a difference.

Stat of the week, quote of my heart ❤️

Tech job postings are down 36% since early 2020, according to Indeed’s Hiring Lab. Some say AI is taking everyone’s jobs.

Tigran says: Don’t sweat it. Just remember Jevons Paradox, that increased efficiency leads to more demand, not less.

“I'm a very strong believer that we’re going to need even more engineers than we did before, and we’re going to have more engineers than we did before. I think the concept of software engineers getting replaced is completely dumbfounding. But what happens in reality is when things get faster and cheaper to make—you just make more of them.”

❤️‍🔥H.o.t.j.o.b.s❤️‍🔥

Genway AI (speedrun004 alum) is building AI agents for user interviews - which can be run at scale, catalogued, and rapidly analyzed to identify what’s working in new releases (and what’s not hitting…). The team is searching for a US-based Sales Exec - email founder / ceo Natan Voitenkov (natan@genway.ai) if you’re interested!

Klavis AI (YC X25, $2.5 million seed) does open source MCP integration for AI applications, and they’re looking for a founding engineer.

The AI-first bioinformatics startup Ploid AI is looking for 2–3 founding engineers. And they’re in Barcelona, baby! CEO and co-founder Adolfo Gastalver Rubio wrote on LinkedIn: “If you have ever thought, ‘I wish I had joined DeepMind / Databricks / etc. in the first 10,’ this is that moment.” Send your application to jobs@ploid.ai.

The folks at AI personal assistant Martin are looking for a founding engineer “who’s eager to dedicate 70+ hours a week to an early stage startup” and do something fun on Sundays, like … “play ping pong or get all-you-can-eat hotpot for dinner.” To apply, send your “proudest technical product” to founders@trymartin.com.

Programmable optics company Lumotive—now backed by a $59 million series B, thanks in large part to Amazon—is hiring for a whole mess of engineering jobs (applications, ASIC, systems, etc.) in the US, Canada, and Oman.

OpenMind, which builds operating systems for robots (their robot OS is called OM1) is looking for a hybrid full-stack engineer in SF. They announced $20 million in funding just this week!

Automated construction permit management platform Permit Flow is looking for engineers. Preference for those who can be in their NYC offices three days/week. They’ve got $36.5 million in backing.

Artin Bogdanov, founder/ceo of SUN cares deeply about learning, and wants to build a product that leverages LLMs + gamification to generate delightful learning experiences for users. He’s searching for “founding mobile engineer #1, a builder with hands-on experience in GenAI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and a track record of crafting engaging mobile products with gamification and social features.” You can email Artin if you’re interested: artin@sunapp.ai

Toma makes AI agents for automotive dealerships. They’re looking for engineers to work a hybrid schedule at their SF offices. Take a look at the openings here, but if you don’t meet all the requirements listed, apply anyway. They still want to have a look.

Infisical is building an open source security infrastructure stack, and they’re looking for cuties like you in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Perks include a free lunch stipend, unlimited PTO, twice annual offsites, and a new MacBook.

E2B, which provides cloud-based sandbox environments for running AI-generated code, is hiring engineers in SF, and a couple in Prague. Roles starting at $150,000 (U.S. or CZk), and some starting much higher. E2B just announced a $21 million series A, with $32 million total funding.

Okay, so Buffer isn’t exactly early stage, but they’re fully remote and famous for being kewl: four-day workweeks, sabbaticals, family stipends, unlimited PTO, savings plan matches. This year, they even flew all their employees to Türkiye for an off-site by the sea. (I invited myself, they said no.) They seldom hire, so it’s worth noting that there are three (three!) open engineering roles right now.

Unicorns and bunnies

• Uzbekistan has its first unicorn! 🦄 Congratulations, y’all! She’s beautiful.

• AI engineer Yangshun posted about his Open AI job offer… then Meta slid into his DMs. Read the saga here.

• I’m sure that by now you’ve all heard the devastating news that the trampoline bunnies are not real. So here are some real bunnies on real trampolines.

So, you want to work at a start up? You need to tell me these things. Apply to the a16z talent network. Real people look at your application. Real people match you to open jobs.

👨🏻‍💻 Adieu mes amies, don’t be strangers.

Time for some more exclusive hot tea! Delve’s COO and co-founder Selin Kocalar opened up about the company’s interview process (it’s fast! 🏎️) and what kind of team she wants to build.

And if Selin won’t hire you, she might introduce you to her founder friends.

I love you, always forever,

❤️ Jordan

Company Spotlight: Delve

So maybe you don’t explicitly enroll at MIT thinking you’ll drop out and form your own startup worth hundreds of millions, but if that is your goal, it might not be a bad plan.

That’s what Selin Kocalar and her MIT classmate Karun Kaushik did with Delve. They were skipping class and staying up late to build an AI medical scribe, but they kept running into the pesky little problem of HIPAA compliance—and that’s how Delve was born.

Selin and Karun entered Y Combinator with their compliance automation platform in 2024, then closed a $3 million seed round in January of this year, followed by a healthy $32 million series A (with a $300 million valuation) in July. Most importantly: They’re hiring. Right now. Go. Run.

Here’s what Selin Kocalar spilled about how they’re building the team—and who they want on it.

The interview process:

I’m a vector, you’re a vector, we’re a vector:

We have an interesting take to hiring here, which is that we’re never hiring for “roles.” The way we see it is every person is a vector and every company is a vector. Our goal on that initial call is to help you find the next jump in your career, even if it means connecting you to other founder friends. (Even today I’m about to intro someone I met last week to another founder.)

Who are you and how can we help?

I tell everyone at the start of my conversations that my hiring hat is off, I’m not looking to hire, I’m looking to understand more about you, hear about your background and figure out your goals for the future and see if we can help at all.

We’ll start with a 30-minute call where you’ll meet one of the team members (if it’s engineering, you’ll meet with one of our backend engineers, for example). If we align, great, let’s talk about next steps. If that goes well, then it’ll go to a call with one of the co-founders. From there, we do a few day work trial where we’ll fly you out to SF. You’ll get to work with the team, or you’ll work with us virtually, and then we come to a decision super fast, a few days at the latest.

No startup experience? No problem.

No, but it is a really good green flag. It shows like they’re willing to break out of the mold and just get obsessed with something and grind, and that’s one of the biggest things we index for. Like founders, they oftentimes experience not just the technical parts, they experience the sales, they experience the marketing. There are so many different operational components and team collaboration components that go into building a startup. Anytime someone’s done that in the past, it’s like, okay, they’ve been there, done that.

Really? Not even about compliance or the healthcare industry?

Literally nothing. A lot of it you can learn on the fly. We have compliance experts on our team and we have folks that have never touched compliance before. It’s great because we get the entire perspective. A lot of the people that we’re selling to, they couldn’t care less about compliance, so it’s about having that kind of shared perspective, being able to resonate with the customer, being able to bring in a different perspective into the compliance industry.

I think being a team player is all it comes down to. It’s about having that shared drive to chase after the mission and encouraging the other people that you work with to join you in that journey.

Collaborate. Period.

I think one trait is always trying to include other people. I think that’s very important in a small team like this where every minute counts. That sort of collaboration, that kind of excitement within the team—it doesn’t matter if you missed out on shipping a line of code in that one minute, but if you had motivated a team member, got someone to feel more included, that goes way further.

Fresh j.o.b.s

Nico Christie of Fundamental Labs, makers of Shortcut, an AI Excel agent - went viral this week after previewing their newest product. Upper-decking finance bros are quivering in their loafers. They’re hiring a GTM Lead, and several engineering + research roles, all based in SF.

AI ad-making platform Icon has one mission: Make viral content. You can help them. They’re filling several founding positions now, all of them NYC-based. Jobs come with $1,500/mo to live near their NoMad office.

Helsinki-based Inven lets VCs, advisors, investors, brokers, and PE find info on private companies 10x faster than Google. They’re looking for a ML engineer, a senior data engineer, a data scientist, a UX designer, and a full-stack developer. Apply by sending your resume and cover letter to info@inven.ai.

🚛 Fully electric shipping company Nevoya has a new $9.3 million seed round and they’re looking for software engineers in SF (starting at $170K+).

Canadian fintech platform Keep is hiring a remote data engineering manager—could be located in the USA, Canada, Mexico, or LATAM.

MecAgent is building an AI CAD copilot for mechanical engineers, and they’re looking for an ML/AI founding engineer. Send your resume to: careers@mecagent.com.

The AI-powered data analytics platform Julius AI, which just announced a $10 million seed, is hiring engineers and a product designer in SF.

Thatch, the platform for personalized health bennies, is looking for engineers and a technical program manager. Head’s up: Their hiring process, start to finish, lasts just two weeks. Better move fast. 🏃🏻‍♂️

Bookkeeping automation platform Uplinq announced a $10 million series A in May, and they’re on a mission to make taxes suck less. They’ve got their work cut out for them. They’re looking for some full-stack engineers (one in Scottsdale, AZ, and one in SF).

The more you know 🌈

Late summer is supposedly a slow time for news, but I say August, Schmaugust. There’s been no shortage of juicy stories in the startup universe recently.

• The Windsurf/Cognition deal has startup talent worried about worst-case scenario buy-outs. Ben Bergman at Business Insider wrote about the questions employees should be asking about their equity.

• Varsha Bansal wrote about the downfall of Builder.ai for Rest of World and asks, was it ever an AI company at all? 👻

• Meta is going to let job candidates use AI during coding tests, according to Jason Koebler at 404 Media.

• Jack Dorsey is back, Bitchats. His new app is now available on the app store.

• TBPN launched “The Metis List” - a list of the top 100 AI researchers, as evaluated by other top AI researchers.

Don’t forget: This newsletter isn’t the only place you can find chic tech jobs in the world’s sexiest startups. I can actually make the introductions for you.

When you apply to the a16z talent network, real humans actually look at what you send us, then we match you to hiring startups.

👨🏻‍💻 See you next time.

I couldn’t help myself: yes, Astronomer has open engineering roles and I’ve linked them below.

Also in this issue: a company bringing AI to manufacturing floors, an invite to slide into one founder’s DMs and another’s inbox.

xoxo,

Jordan

Company Highlight: Squint

So, this is really cool: It used to be that when a factory needed to train new employees on machines, they’d have to partner them up with highly paid senior workers. That’s time and money manufacturers can’t really spare.

Sounds like a task for AI! 🦸🏻‍♂️

Squint’s augmented reality platform lets companies create their own training modules and troubleshooting guides—so any operator can be an expert. And it’s got all the bells and whistles: spatial navigation, video manuals, digital data entry…and video-to-procedure AI, which lets users convert a video of an expert performing a task into a guided procedure.

Squint was also named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2025 in the AR/VR category. They’re looking for engineers in the Bay Area.

Fresh j.o.b.s

Canopy Labs cofounders Amu Varma (Oxford, Z Fellow) and Elias Fizesan (Columbia, Thiel Fellow, Z Fellow) recently launched Orpheus (>5k github stars), a foundation speech model, and are searching for ML Engineers, “cracked college students,” and AI infra engineers to join them in SF.

The Dex team has a similar mission as this publication - specifically, they want to make the job searching process suck much less. They’re hiring engineers, MLEs, a designer, and a sales lead.

The Lovable team just raised an eye-watering $200M, hired one of the most well-respected PLG / GTM experts in the game (ahem, Elena Verna), and is now hiring a community lead.

Avery Krieger is looking for a founding engineer at Constellation, a neuro AI startup still in stealth. Apply here. He was really emphatic on LinkedIn that applicants should follow the directions in the job listing, so…do that.

Marc Papazian at QA automation platform Propolis is looking for a founding engineer and offering a $10K referral bonus for anyone with a good lead.

Asylon, maker of a robot guard dog (!), is looking for a software engineer and a data scientist in Norristown, PA.

Bioinformatics agent Keplogic is searching for its founding AI systems engineer. Read the job posting here, but you can apply by emailing CTO Quinn Leng directly at quinn@keplogic.com.

Debt repayment platform Ditch is hiring a founding engineer. DM the founder Luis Andino on LinkedIn to apply.

AI-enabled contract research procurement platform Cromatic is looking for a founding engineer to work a hybrid schedule out of their SF office.

Military logistics startup Rune Technologies, which just raised a $24M series A to build AI-enabled software for defense, is hiring in Rosslyn, VA.

DataOps platform Astronomer—which hasn’t been in the news at all—is looking for engineers in Hyderabad and in NYC.

Oh - and my team, the a16z speedrun team, is searching for a new investing partner! You can read more about the role in this post, authored by Jon Lai - General Partner at the fund, and hiring manager for the role.

TobyTalks (expert advice on landing that next j.o.b.)

I really like this post on the Wellfound blog about the little things recruiters will remember about you. It’s from an interview with Gloria Dallas, lead recruiter at Snappr (they’re also hiring, btw).

It’s full of good wisdom, but I’ll point our two points in particular:

1) Hard skills might get you the interview, but soft skills will land you the job

Gloria says:

“We have so many people that have all of the hard skills. Usually, we’re not going to interview someone that doesn’t have all of the hard skills... But then the person that we ultimately end up hiring is the person that has the best soft skills out of that group.”

“This means your resume should emphasize technical capabilities, certifications, and specific tools. But in interviews, you need to demonstrate ownership, conflict resolution, customer-facing abilities, and leadership potential.”

2) Warm up a cold application with a friendly message to a recruiter

We all know networking is a more reliable path to getting hired, but what if you simply don’t have an in? Gloria suggests dropping a note like this:

“I’ve been working at this computer vision startup for the last five years. I just saw that Snappr is also working in computer vision and that you have a product management position. I think I'd be a really good fit. Just wanted to let you know that I submitted my application.”

All the news that’s fit to print in my little corner of the in-ter-nit

• Vibe coding platform Lovable is now officially a unicorn (just eight months after launch!) with a $1.8 billion valuation. I mentioned them the other week because they’re hiring in Stockholm. They’ve got 2.3 million active users and (not as many) open jobs for you.

• Engineers in Latin America are building an alternative to ChatGPT: Latam-GPT.

• Some would-be founders are going the blue collar route, and instead, buying up lucrative small businesses and making them bigger.

• Tal Raviv over at Lenny’s Letter wrote about “context engineering” and how to build your own AI copilot.

👨🏻‍💻 Gosh, I’m already thinking of next week and the new gems I’ll have found for you then.

PS… Don’t forget to apply to the a16z talent network. We actually look through the roster, then match applicants to startups!