jobs
Some friends and acquaintances of mine run pre-seed and Series A companies and asked me for some help finding good talent to recruit for their teams, so I am sharing these openings here, ordered by whoever asked me first.
- Note: I only list companies where I have personally connected with the founders so I know that it’s a good opportunity for freshers and professionals in my network.
- Holocron Technologies: Founding Engineer
- Clarisights: Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer
Read This Before Applying
- Since these are early-stage companies (team size 2-50), they expect you to have some degree of independent contributor experience and the ability to collaborate with teams, matching their pace of work. So you want to be sure you have at least 60-70% of the requirements (in terms of experience with the desired tech stack(s)) met before applying so that you don’t end up feeling lost and falling behind after getting hired.
- As a concrete example, if you’re a fresher with absolutely no internship experience and no prior projects using the expected tech stack or a related one, the expectations and pace of work may be a challenge to match, and it’s in your best interest to get some experience before going after such roles.
- On the other hand if you already have experience working with teams and delivering products/projects that scale, have been deployed in the cloud for some end users, or use a similar tech stack (frontend, REST APIs, database connections, and so on) then you might not need to fulfil all of the other requirements esp. in terms of expected years of experience.
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That said, it’s rare for any company to find a perfect fit for any role and most early stage startups recruit for potential and not demonstrated experience, so sometimes it’s best to just apply and find out (having done this myself, I should know :)).
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Referral: If you’re really interested (and I mean you’ve actually done your research into the company, founders, team, products, and news) in one of these roles and you believe your profile fits at least 70% of the requirements (other than, say, 3 years of experience for freshers), I’d be happy to drop a personal reference to them about your application.
- This is especially for folks whose work I know of (or can verify through my network), especially all you SimPPL and Unicode members who have built and deployed tools at scale, feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn and drop me a note with your connection request.
- If this blows up, I’ll have to be judicious about references so I might not be able to respond to everyone as quickly, but don’t let that stop you from applying anyway!
Holocron Technologies
Stage: Pre-seed
Role: Founding Engineer (US Citizenship required)
Location: Washington DC (in-person)
- Personal Note: Addam and Tristan were introduced to me by a mutual connection and we immediately connected on the increasing need for network data analysis at scale. I’m really excited by their mission to make sense of the information chaos given their unique background working for the govt. and in defense. It’s really hard to find great opportunities to work in defense and adjacent areas on cutting-edge tech so this is a great chance for you to join a team building a pivotal product for a unique customer segment.
Holocron Technologies is focused on the collection and processing of publicly available information with a mission to track global science and technology developments, creating a dual-use technology platform that serves the needs of both public and private sector customers. They aim to build one of the most comprehensive science and technology intelligence platforms in the industry. Holocron is an early-stage startup backed by New North Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Fulcrum Venture Group, Sica Ventures, OneSixOne Ventures, FiDi Ventures, Syndicate 708, and other private investors.
They are seeking an experienced Data Science / Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer to join our growing team as a founding engineer. The founding engineer will be responsible for developing advanced algorithms and models that extract valuable insights from large volumes of unstructured text data.
- Apply: Read more about the details of this role here and note that they are recruiting US Citizens only, to my knowledge.
Clarisights
Stage: Series A (read their announcement)
Roles: Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer
Location: Bengaluru, Berlin (in-person)
- Personal Note: I was supposed to intern with Arun and Ankur’s team in 2018 way back when I was an undergrad, and I spent a week in Bangalore with the team, super excited by the stack they were building on because it was one of the few places that was offering me an SRE role as an intern. Unfortunately with college timing conflicts and other commitments that came calling, it wasn’t meant to be. I kept in touch though, and met Arun recently, in New York. I’m so excited by the work they’re doing and even more so by the (now 50-strong) team they’ve built out. Imagine having people potentially finding bugs in the Linux kernel just as an accidental byproduct of their responsibilities! To me, that’s a one-of-a-kind team you get to work alongside. Clarisights have built some really interesting products and if you want to develop a really unique skillset working on a high-performing team, I’d highly recommend applying to join them.
Clarisights was founded to empower performance marketing and growth teams by creating a platform that gives them insights and superhero powers they have always wanted. Rather than wrestling with outdated spreadsheets and BI platforms that can’t keep pace with their growing volume of marketing channels and data, marketers can use Clarisights to independently explore and analyze all their data in a single and intuitive interface. Marketing teams around the world use Clarisights for every aspect of their performance marketing workflow - from integrating with data channels, creating and optimizing dashboards and reports, and collaborating with teammates - all in real-time. And these solutions help us deliver success to our growing list of world-class customers such as Uber, Delivery Hero, Hello Fresh, Universal Music Group, and Glovo.
- Apply: As of posting this, they’re recruiting Software engineers and Site reliability engineers with the application available here.
Stay tuned for more job openings announcements coming soon!
Note
If you’re a student wondering what you can do to get the skills needed for these types of roles, please read the following section.
SimPPL
At SimPPL we are a free and open research collective run by pro bono volunteers who build interesting scalable data science tools for trust and safety, and civic integrity. Our mission is to improve trust on the social internet by limiting the spread and influence of online misinformation. We’ve won a bunch of grants from Google, the Wikimedia Foundation, the NYC Media Lab, and work on projects with global orgs. like the Sunday Times, Deutsche Welle, Oxford University, the Yale Daily News, and the VTDigger among others.
In 2017, I co-founded DJ Unicode as a training program for students to ramp up on software engineering basics, and I launched Unicode Research as a collaborative research group aiming to coauthor publications. But after writing our first workshop paper for NeurIPS, we realized we also wanted to drive meaningful social impact through our work. So we started building tools using machine learning and natural language processing in India, Bangladesh, and other so-called ‘global south’ countries that can benefit most from them.
SimPPL was born out of Unicode Research, so that we could focus on building interesting tools at scale (systems that can analyze millions of tweets each minute, or process hundreds of thousands of comments each day, and run queries over 100GB+ of data in seconds) and we put in the months of hard engineering legwork to do it. This included web scraping, building data infrastructure, setting up database management systems, systems design, preprocessing real-time streams of data, and scaling visualizations to name a few problems. We’ve been able to do a fairly good job of it so far so we’re happy to welcome new folks to join us to contribute to such projects!
For example we built Parrot Report to identify coordinated networks on Twitter, and we’re building a collective tracker for information spread on Bluesky, Youtube, Truth Social, and other platforms at Arbiter Report.
There’s a lot of cool work we’re doing, you can consult our deck for details.
If you’re interested in being a contributor to these projects as a current undergrad or graduate student (we also have full-time DS/MLE folks in IC, advisory, and mentorship roles), so that you can develop industry-focused skills with cloud-based systems, data infra., ML/NLP, and (very importantly) SQL, we can create project-based pathways to help you prepare yourself better for opportunities listed above at startups and early-stage companies. Reach out to me on LinkedIn to learn more!