What’s our hiring philosophy?
We are never in a hurry to hire anyone. A small team of cracked people will beat a large team every single time.
Noah and I have made the mistake of hiring someone because we had a lot of work to do. When we do, we inevitably realize that no one is happy micromanaging them, and things don’t work out.
A lot of people also ask what we’re looking for — this is Noah’s favorite diagram. We aim to exclusively hire people who can identify the right problems, solve them autonomously, and keep the team informed as they do it. This requires sound judgment, strong technical fundamentals, curiosity, and follow-through. You need to know when to move scrappily, when to slow down and be rigorous, and which problems are not worth solving at all.
↑ More money, impact, and freedom
They identify the right problem and get it solved.
Tell them the problem; they set up a system to figure it out—people and process included.
Tell them what to do; they figure out how.
Tell them what to do, how to do it, and when—and it will get done.
Even with direction, they rarely do it right.
- L5SuperstarThey identify the right problem and get it solved.
- L4Systems ThinkerTell them the problem; they set up a system to figure it out—people and process included.
- L3Problem SolverTell them what to do; they figure out how.
- L2Task MonkeyTell them what to do, how to do it, and when—and it will get done.
- L1UselessEven with direction, they rarely do it right.
What tools do we use, and how does the team work?
We have one-week sprints and a 10-minute, team-wide stand-up every morning. We try to minimize meetings for engineers because every engineer should be on a Maker’s Schedule by default. Everyone is responsible for planning their own roadmap and goals each week.
We aggressively use agents to automate things like first-pass code reviews, Sentry triaging, Slack announcements, first-touch customer support, etc. Everyone at our company writes code with Cursor and Claude Code. Keeping all of our company’s context in code — and making it accessible through MCPs — is key to making us hyper-efficient.
What types of engineers are we looking for?
Our goal is to build a cracked, in-person team of engineers in San Francisco. In general, we try to hire people who are better than us.
At this stage, we’re not looking for deep expertise in one particular subject, though it can be helpful in areas like payments, sandbox infrastructure, and inference. We ARE looking for people with first-principles thinking, solid system design, and a passion for the craft of software engineering.
You should be able to work on many problems at the same time and make good trade-offs between product, architecture, and tech debt. Above all, you should take work off other people’s plates and have a multiplier effect on the team.
What types of projects will engineers work on?
We expect engineers to own features end-to-end, including product, design, and customer success. We split projects into programs and platforms. Programs are customer-facing bets that require deep customer understanding. Platforms are shared systems that make many programs possible.
Platform
- Building sandbox infrastructure for our agents (managing secrets, proxies, and compute)
- Building an eval framework for our models
- Launching an analytics platform on ClickHouse/MSK that consumes millions of events per day
- Building an agentic workflow orchestration architecture
- Building a public API for Replo/Slack bots
- Overhauling our billing system to support arbitrary usage-based billing
Programs
- Enabling customers to buy domains directly through Replo
- Building agent-driven insight reporting for businesses
- Building a full product-customizer UI for custom print-on-demand products
What is our tech stack?
We use TypeScript almost exclusively, with a bit of Python for ML explorations. We use Sentry, Grafana, and PostHog for logging and alerting. We have a proprietary harness inspired by OpenCode, and we aggressively use tools like Braintrust and OpenRouter. Our analytics products use Kafka and ClickHouse.