Job stories

Converge is building the unified marketing measurement stack for online stores. We make it easy for marketeers to understand where their customers come from, cut unprofitable channels, and scale when things are working.

We graduated from the YC S23 cohort last year. Since then, we scaled to 7-figures in ARR, now serving 180+ customers (including publicly listed companies). All the while, we kept our team very small with just 2 engineers, making this a great opportunity to join an early-stage startup with strong traction.

We are well-funded and backed by the founders of PostHog, Algolia, Postscript, Shipbob, Showpad, etc.

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## Role

We're looking for senior full-stack engineers who can ship product end-to-end. You will have ownership over solving specific customer problems, designing, building, and iterating on solutions.

## Product

We vertically integrate the modern data stack for B2C marketing teams by consolidating customer data collection, consent management, identity resolution, transformations, attribution, data forwarding, and analytics into a single platform.

On top of our shared data infrastructure, we have 2 customer-facing products

- Connections: a CDP for marketing integrations — ‘Segment for e-commerce’

- Analytics: custom attribution reporting — ‘Amplitude for e-commerce’

These help VPs of Marketing & Growth (1) understand how they acquire customers and (2) optimize their spend allocation for more profitable growth.

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Apply here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/converge/jobs/GQWZ40Z-...

We are looking to make our first engineering hire at Clearest Health. This role will report directly to the CTO.

We are in an unsexy $300 B market that desperately needs better incentive alignment, which can only be achieved through better technology. Your work will directly impact the health and savings of 60% of the American population. We have a five-year tech roadmap, a strong sales motion, and significant funding.

If you are a good fit, you’ll join us in our Soho Office, get covered lunch + dinner, Equinox membership, weekly massages, and whatever you need to make the 10 years your best 10 years. Expect your friends to ask why you are working so hard and then ask if they can work with you.

Culture-fit Requirements

Customer-obsessed Opinionated but convincible Has great taste Wicked fast iterations High trust, high loyalty Cares deeply about changing healthcare and insurance Role Guidelines

- Measure twice, cut once. Design features by presenting multiple options for review prior to implementation. You show good judgment when making technical trade-offs. - High ownership. You can operate independently and own features end to end with minimal guidance. - Comfortable with moving fast, taking shortcuts as directed and technical guidance. - Super user of Cursor & Chrome Dev Tools. - Background in life sciences, UX or product design is a plus. - Design and build products from repo creation - Extreme knowledge and expertise in building data-intensive applications

Technical Stack

- Frontend: React, React Router, Tailwind.css and Mantine. - Backend: Node.js + Typescript Hono Lambda. Heavy IO operations will be written in Go. - Infrastructure: - Auth: Clerk (we will roll our own using Auth.js eventually) - Hosting: AWS, Cloudflare Pages - Compute: AWS Lambda, ECS Fargate (for long running jobs) - Storage: S3, DynamoDB, PostgresSQL - Analytics: CloudWatch, Metabase

Imagine if the internet were a database. What would you build?

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We’re building out the early engineering team of expand.ai, where we’re (a) solving a problem the world urgently needs to be solved, that is (b) one of the most challenging problems in technology, (c) alongside a team of exceptional engineers (d) offering you the chance to have a massive impact, (e) while having fun (f) and be reward accordingly.

(a) Problem

While LLMs are democratizing intelligence, access to data remains a huge bottleneck. We're changing that by building state-of-the-art web extraction agents that structure millions of websites—one at a time.

Scraping is not new. Folks have written XPaths, manual beautiful soup scripts, etc.

However, two things changed:

1. Scraping is needed even more than before. Almost any AI application needs access to some data from the internet. 2. We’re in the post-LLM era. While LLMs are too expensive to run over the internet, they enable previously impossible capabilities.

That’s why we’re on a mission to build a reliable data layer for the web.

When we soft launched in September, we got an insane amount of interest, with over 170 demos booked in 24 hours. This confirms how much of a problem this is for folks.

We’re luckily not alone on this mission and have backing from the best: YCombinator, Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel), Swyx (Founder, smol ai), Sarah Guo (Conviction Embed), Alana Goyal (basecase capital), Max Claussen (system.one), Ellen Chisa, Charly Poly, … and many more!

(b) Tech challenges

We have collectively coded for over 20 years and never faced this difficulty of a technical challenge. We’re building a highly dynamic system that needs to deal with the undeterministic nature of the internet, at scale.

Some of the challenges we’re tackling:

1. Building a fair system across multiple tenants (noisy neighbors) 2. Quickly scaling up and down web agent and AI infra depending on demand 3. Coordinate thousands of web agents that concurrently try to extract data 4. High-quality data pipelines to make sure our clients get only the correct data. We care a lot about reliability and correctness. 5. Scaling our system to millions of websites 6. Our agents need to be able to perform actions on websites - not all of them directly show the information we need to get! 7. As this is such new territory, a lot of the tooling we need doesn’t exist yet and we have to build it ourselves.

What is our answer to these? How will we win?

In short - good old software engineering.

Longer Answer:

- We’re making heavy use of [Effect](https://effect.website/), which allows us to gain as much control as you possibly can in such an undeterministic environment. Also, it will enable us to represent complex agentic workflows while keeping a deep level of observability. - We’re making use of the latest advances in AI, including training our own models and using the latest insights from research. - It took us a while to arrive at the current system design, and we certainly don’t have all the answers yet, but we have iterated on our main architecture multiple times, which allows us to represent very complex workflows.

(c) Team

We’re a nimble team of 2 right now.

1. [Tim Suchanek](https://github.com/timsuchanek) (Founder) 1. Tim was the first engineer at Prisma, where he led the development of several tools, including the GraphQL Playground and Prisma ORM, which are now used by millions of developers. 2. Tim then founded Stellate, a GraphQL API management company that handled billions of monthly requests from customers like Nasa, Puma, and Priceline. Stellate was acquired by Shopify in 2024. 3. Tim does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) as a hobby and holds a blue belt in it. 2. [Tylor Steinberger](https://github.com/TylorS) (Founding Engineer) 1. Tylor joined the Cycle.js project early on, building out major parts of the system. 2. After a career in startup tech, Tylor last led the frontend development at Seasoned, where he implemented one of the [first functional full-stack frameworks](https://github.com/TylorS/typed), which is still used today. 3. As a hobby, Tylor implements his own programming language and always thinks about how to push the boundaries of programming. 3. You 1. What kind of engineering profile are we looking for? You’re a good fit if you 1. Are backend-focused and have worked on a difficult project before 2. Have a machine-learning background and have built data pipelines before 3. Have worked on scalable infrastructure 4. Have a distributed systems background 5. If none of the above matches, but you think you’re excellent - apply nevertheless!

(d) Impact

While there are established use cases for web scraping, such as e-commerce cataloging, extracting accurate data from websites is becoming a crucial building block for AI agents and supporting better decision-making. Transforming the internet into a queryable database will emerge a whole new economy, enabling more informed choices across various sectors. Our mission is to power that economy and facilitate improved decision-making processes. The demand for our system is undeniably strong, with thousands of people reaching out to gain access.

(e) Fun

As you can probably already read, we try not to take ourselves too seriously. We’re working very hard at [expand.ai](http://expand.ai), and it’s just super important that we’re all enjoying our work and each other's company. Yes, part of it also includes edgy (but respectful) jokes.

One thing that makes it much more fun is being together in person! We have a nice, cozy office in Dogpatch, San Francisco. Eating together, doing whiteboard sessions together, hacking together—it’s just so much more fun to be in person!

That’s why: **This is an in-person position only. Please don’t apply if you can’t move to SF.**

(f) Compensation

We’re putting a lot of love and energy into this project, so while having a massive impact, we also want you and us to be able to capture some of the value we create.

We have a generous equity package, especially for the first few folks!

If you want to grow, push your limits and are also excited about solving hard technical problems, please reach out to foundingengineer@expand.ai.

Nowadays is an AI copilot that automates the boring parts of planning corporate events. For example, our AI can contact venues by email and phone to get availability, deal with back-and-forth negotiations, and present the best options.

We’re looking for founding engineer at Nowadays — someone who’s proactive, generalist full-stack, loves bringing people together, and comfortable shipping end-to-end products. We use Next.js and Supabase to build our platform. Your role will involve continuously innovating, automating processes, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI in event planning.

Learn more at Nowadays here: https://nowadays.ai/

We’re looking for a hacker to join our team of 3 on-site in San Francisco. You would be one of the founding engineers; why join us, when you can start a company yourself or work at an OpenAI? Here’s our case:

Instant is (a) a really hard problem (b) that users want (c) worked on by an excellent team (d) where you can have immense impact and (e) be compensated accordingly.

Let me explain:

## (a) a really hard problem

For the last two years, we’ve been hacking on Instant, the modern Firebase. Instant is a database you can use directly from the browser; you write queries, and they stay in sync, work offline, and come with optimistic updates out of the box. You get auth, and a system for running permissions too. You also have support for presence, and SDKs for React, vanilla JS, and React Native.

For years we were in a cave building and talking to a core group of users; Instant turned out to be one of the hardest products we’ve ever worked on. We built a multi-tenant architecture, so we could offer a free tier that never freezes (you can even spin up a database without signing up, check out the tutorial [1]. We had to write a query engine on the backend, and a sync layer on top of that. To do it, we scoured articles on Figma’s LiveGraph, Asana’s Luna, and Andy Pavlo’s courses.

We open sourced last month, and had one of the largest Show HN’s for a YC company [2]. And soon after that, we announced a 3.4M seed round, backed by James Tamplin (the founder of Firebase), Paul Graham, Greg Brockman, Jeff Dean, Amjad Masad, Karri Saarinen, and 50+ technical angels.

## (b) that users want

Since launch, we have been flooded with user requests. Some of the largest infra and AI companies have reached out to us for integrations. We have people asking for enterprise deals, and had to turn some down due to bandwidth.

You probably resonate yourself — you know how much of a schlep software development can be: spin up databases, write endpoints, funnel data to store, and finally paint screens. You do all of that, and the app is just ok. If you want to make it great, time to add reactivity, optimistic updates, and offline mode.

It doesn’t have to be this hard. There’s a missing abstraction, and it looks like a database you can use in the browser. Companies like Figma, Asana, Linear, and Notion have all built this internally. It’s obvious to us that most apps will be built this way in the future, and we built Instant to power them.

## (c) worked on by an excellent team

For the longest time, we’ve been a very small team: right now it’s just 3 of us: Joe Averbukh, Daniel Woelfel, and me. We’ve known each-other for 10 years, and have worked across companies together. We think small teams of very talented people are special; It’s more fun, you get more autonomy, and you form relationships for life.

This is how it feels at Instant. Each of us own projects that would have deserved large infrastructure orgs at other companies. Each of us takes our craft and our word seriously; it’s a breath of fresh air to work together, knowing that when you ask for help, you have someone who you deeply respect by your side.

## (d) where you can have immense impact

Our current architecture got us to a new stage, but to really excel at this next stage, there’s a lot more to do.

We recently had to turn down 2 customers because they would have added 2 magnitudes more traffic. Our infrastructure can’t handle that yet, but perhaps with your help, they will. Maybe you could dive deep into our sync engine: what kind of algorithms can we write to improve invalidation? How can we jig postgres to make queries even faster? How can we send less data to the client?

We have a storage service in beta. We want to make it the best one on the market. We want files to live in your database too, so they can be reactive, and work with permissions out of the box. You shouldn’t have to deal with presigned URLs. You shouldn’t need triggers to sync different datastores. You should just be able to upload files from the client.

We have a multi-tenant database you can start with, but what about existing companies? They already use Postgres. Well, what if we created a Postgres adapter for Instant? We could take Instant queries and translated them to postgres SQL. What kind of [postgres introspection queries](https://github.com/instantdb/instant/blob/main/server/src/in...) would you need to write to infer the schema?

Right now we have no story for load testing. We want to build a suite to track metrics to track perf and have visibility on improvements/degradation. Even something akin to the one-laptop solution [4] Figma had up to 2020 would be a big win for us. Can you build it?

Or how about our client side SDK. Our reactive layer on the client is a state machine, and it’s getting out of control. Maybe it’s time to introduce observables. Can you add them? We should be able to introspect into the state of the client: what happens when you make a transaction? Can we see it propagate and change throughout the SDK?

## (e) be compensated accordingly

If this was a few months ago, I would not have written this, I didn’t think the risk/reward would be worth it for you. But at this point, I really think it is. We’re just at the point where we could hit PMF with your help, and since we haven’t raised an A yet, we can offer you significant equity to make it happen.

If you’re the kind of person who gets excited about this stuff, who truly loves their craft, and wants to work with others who do, who moves fast, but isn’t afraid to look deep into the ‘scarier’ programming problems. we want to talk to you.

You can reach out to us at founders [at] instantdb

[1] Tutorial: https://instantdb.com/tutorial

[2] Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41322281

[3] Seed round: https://x.com/stopachka/status/1841514927099437144

[4] One laptop solution: https://www.figma.com/blog/keeping-figma-fast/

About us: We're a digital caregiver that helps older & disabled adults avoid retirement communities and age well in their own homes. We tailor on demand APIs from companies like Uber and Instacart to the needs of people living with cognitive, visual, mobility and dexterity impairments. We're operating profitably with millions in revenue and growing quickly. Our company is remote first. Total engineering headcount, including this position, is eight.

The positions: FULLY REMOTE | Full-time | US, UK, or able to work 4+ hours overlap with mainland US (UK time working hours also OK) | $100k to $160k (partially location-dependent)

Build high-quality, robust engineering at the rarest of things - a Silicon Valley startup that is both wholesome AND profitable. We have 8-figure revenue, are YC-backed, and growing fast.

Tech stack (required): Back-end heavy (Node, Typescript, MySQL, REST*+GraphQL), front-end (Vue), deploy (AWS, Docker/K8s)

Minimum 6 years experience (mostly Node/Vue)

2-stage interview process.

If you want to help older adults and people with disabilities, send your LinkedIn/CV to william@gogograndparent.com (keep it brief) or apply at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gogograndparent/jobs