Cofounder / Founding Engineer (American Politics Company)

Comp

• Contracting work: $100/hr

• Full-time hire: $200k base + ~1%-10% (depending on how good you are). Can give up some base for more equity.

• Cofounder: up to an equal equity stake as Barak, the first founder.

• The general idea is that you’re exceptional, and I’ll pay you 5x market total comp. For now, that’ll mean 5x equity, but later we can trade off equity for even more cash, after we raise.

Why you might want to work here

Values:

Values

• You are undervalued at your current role

• Everyone is always telling you to sit down, shut up, and focus on your specific job.

• You love to code, but you don’t care about Haskell vs Rust as an identity-based value.
• You learned to code for fun, or to make money, but now you code to make money and to build things for people, to solve real problems.
• The user and business comes first, not your sexy new functional framework.

• You are willing to work for a political tech company. We’re a platform. Our culture will be more like Stripe than Pinterest. See values for more culture.

• You’d love to be at a company with only brilliant (we’re talking, at least AIME if not USAMO) people.
• My strat is going to be to hire only 10x people, and hire far fewer of them.

• Thoughts on leadership/management
• I will only hire people at least as good as I am
I will treat people like adults and give them full agency/autonomy, coupled with very strong feedback whenever I have it
• When I say, for example, I disagree with this decision because Supabase is good enough for now and we don’t need to differentiate on our efficient, custom backend infra, you’re supposed to either say: No, this specific GPT thing is 10x cheaper if we DIY and it’ll only take me another day to finish it. Or, oh, you’re correct, never mind. Or, alright, why don’t we agree to use Supabase until X threshold of downtime/cost/manual maintenance is incurred and we’ll revisit this then.
• You have to be senior. I will not be writing out your Jira tickets or reminding you to show up to meetings on time.

What you’ll own (depends on candidate)

• Engineering (frontend, backend, data pipelines)
• Soon we’ll hire more people who have complementary skill sets and interests to you.

• Design (optional)

• Not Product (Barak owns product, for now)

What you’ll get to build

• Stripe for politics

• Solid, sturdy full-stack webapp (and soon, react native app) for meetbilly.co
• Ad generator, using GPT/image gen
• Ad forum / social network
• Ad targeting software for billboards and mailers

• Literally All The Integrations / Plumbing
• Fintech: Lots of money movement stuff (we’re going to be allowing peer-to-peer political spending)
• Persona / similar for Know Your Customer
• PDF / data wrangling integrations for things like automatically submitting required disclosures / new ad creative to the government / an external api / Outfront

Administrivia

• I’m in SF; easiest if you’re here too. Otherwise,
• Must be willing to move to SF or NYC in the next 12 months.
• Must be willing to spend at least 1 week every 2 months in person at company onsites.

• We will get you the exact healthcare you want (I’m thinking Anthem or Kaiser, but lmk).

• We will get you a 401k (no matching yet)

• Various frivolous tech perks will come in proportion to how much funding we raise

• One unusual perk: the founder is an amazing chef and will cook you ribeye, puff pastry, beet salad, whatever will keep you sated

• Unlimited PTO: minimum 10 days a year + holidays
• Limited PTO encourages people to not take PTO, quit, and then cash it out.

• I believe more than 6h of focused work a day is impossible, I will not be giving up my personal life for this company, and neither will you.
• That said, obviously sometimes we’ll sprint to ship a time-sensitive thing.