Founding Engineer at Ref

The Problem

Resumes are rapidly becoming obsolete. AI-enhanced applications are flooding hiring pipelines, making it impossible for companies to identify truly qualified candidates among thousands of submissions. Meanwhile, professionals struggle to showcase their full potential beyond a static resume. The hiring sector remains tethered to this outdated system, and even AI solutions are hitting a ceiling on what they can achieve with limited resume data. It's time for a new approach to hiring.

About Ref

Ref is an AI-Native hiring platform designed to address the challenges faced by hiring teams AND candidates in today's AI-enhanced application landscape. 

For hiring teams we provide advanced predictive talent and hiring tools that tackle their most pressing hiring needs. Our platform streamlines the candidate screening process, transforming it into an efficient, data-driven operation that significantly reduces time-to-hire while improving the quality of matches.

Complementing our company-focused tools, we're developing a comprehensive professional history platform for job seekers. This includes creating persistent profiles validated by references, with detailed professional histories, and integrations with platforms like GitHub, design portfolios, and other sources that provide insight into a professional's history. This approach will furnish hiring teams with a substantially richer dataset to analyze, offering deeper insights into candidates' skills, experiences, and potential fit beyond what traditional resumes can provide and automate the painful process of custom resume tailoring for every application. 

By connecting what companies need to know with what candidates can meaningfully showcase, Ref is building a more transparent, efficient, and effective hiring landscape. Our goal is to facilitate optimal connections between talent and opportunities, benefiting both hiring teams and job seekers in the process.

Our Traction

We have developed a fully operational AI candidate screening platform that is currently being used by a major tech company with a global presence. Our product has moved well beyond the MVP stage and is actively streamlining hiring processes in a real-world, enterprise environment. Building on this success, we are rapidly expanding our functionality to include AI-native assisted interview preparation, a sophisticated candidate outreach CRM, and intelligent new hire onboarding tools. Our stack leverages AI and cloud technologies, including Python, FastAPI, Postgres, AWS, LlamaIndex, React, Anthropic and integrations with leading AI inference providers.

What We're Looking For

We're seeking a curious, committed, and hacker-minded engineer to join the team and assist our development efforts. You'd work on the development of our core products, potentially impacting both the company and professional sides of our platform. As an early team member you would be ready to wear any hat that is needed. You:

• Have a hacker mindset: You're an excellent coder, love to tinker, and are a generalist who can build an end-to-end tool. You're a nerd who we could go win hackathons with. We prefer a skillset founded in Python.
• Are familiar and involved with the latest transformer models: LLMs, Vector Databases, Agentic Functionality, RAG, LLM Frameworks, etc. are things you have been diving into.
• Have relevant experience: We're not going to put a number on the years of experience you have. Have you worked at a startup before? Do you regularly engage with domain experts? Are you a regular contributor to an open source community? We want to set you up for success to lead a huge initiative, so you tell us what you've done that shows off that you can do this.
• Are empathetic: We love hackers but we also love people and we consider empathy to be #1. Can you build while being mindful about the larger needs of the company? Do you believe in user feedback and talking to customers directly? Do your instincts drive you to solve for problems, instead of building features? Can you pull excellence from your team and care about their professional growth?

Skills/Experience: Advanced Python programming, AWS services, FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Instructor, vector databases (e.g. Pinecone, Pgvector, Weaviate, Vespa), Postgres, Redis, database design and query optimization, Machine Learning and NLP techniques, API development and management, Git for version control, CI/CD pipeline experience, automated testing, implementation of security best practices, building scalable and fault-tolerant architectures. Experience with React for front-end development is a plus.

Our core goal is to continue enhancing our product and expanding its capabilities. This role will:

• Further develop and refine our AI candidate screening platform.
• Contribute to new features such as AI-assisted interview prep, candidate outreach CRM, and new hire onboarding tools.
• Help define Ref's technical vision, tech stack, and roadmap.
• Work directly with the founders and team to talk to customers, review feedback, scope the product, and define quick iterations.
• Work with the team to rapidly address any bugs or outages. 

This job is fully remote, with a preference for San Francisco/Seattle but that is in no way a requirement.

Ref is currently bootstrapped, and our strong preference is for this role to be equity-only until our first round of funding is complete, likely in Spring 2025 after securing multiple enterprise customers. We believe this arrangement allows you to fully benefit from the potential upside of our venture. We are intentionally avoiding funding to maximize our leverage at our raise. We can consider offering compensation in lieu of equity, but it's important to note that the role would be significantly different as a hired developer versus a founding engineer with an equity stake. There is a huge opportunity to join the team early, shape the company's future, and learn cutting-edge technologies that will advance your career. We believe in everyone sharing in our success, and joining as an equity partner demonstrates a shared commitment to our vision. It's a personal decision to join a very early-stage startup, one that requires unique life circumstances given the lack of compensation and we recognize that. These are the trenches of early startup life: high risk, but potentially high reward. This is enterprise plus startup, it is ambitious! We're looking for those who are excited by this challenge and ready to grow with us.

Not sure if you're a fit? Feel free to apply anyway! We are looking for exceptional talent:

• Have a different skill set but love the concept and want to see if there's a fit.
• Don't have AI experience but you're a hacker who's passionate about learning.
• Can't commit to a role full-time because you work at a top org but would love to work with Ref part-time.

The Team

We are a tight-knit group of 5 hard workers, including AWS and Google engineers, a CPA-ish, and a high-school grad who all take pride in what we do. We're grounded, straightforward, and committed to building something truly useful. We believe deeply in empathy, winning together, and giving each other opportunities to stretch beyond our current skills.

At the end of the day, we're simply looking forward to having another brilliant teammate in the trenches with us to collaborate and be on this journey with.