Founding Engineer

Slidely is a PowerPoint plugin that makes it easy to create beautiful company-branded slides rapidly. Slidely is already used by several consulting companies and teams at Fortune 500 companies. 

Who are we?​

Hi! We’re a small but strong team of 3:
Apoorve, co-founder & CEO, product & sales

Nikhil, co-founder & CTO, product & engineering

Dinesh, engineer, engineering

Both founders are CS graduates from IIT Kharagpur with a specialization in AI.

Slidely is officially set up in the US, but all 3 of us work out of Bangalore. Slidely is new, but revenue-making. We are funded by amazing investors like Y Combinator and supported by prominent leaders, founders and executives.

What languages and tools do we work with?

Our main product is a PowerPoint add-in (client) that users install on their PC.

Languages -
Client logic: The code for the client is written in VB.NET (visual basic .net), a strongly-typed object-oriented language and is much like Python in its syntax.

Client design: The design of the client is done in XAML, an extension of XML, that has live preview at design-time. We use the Telerik UI for WPF library, which provides good-looking components like buttons and treeviews out-of-the-box but are still customizable.

Server: For some operations, the client interfaces with the Slidely server. The Slidely server is a Node application written in Typescript, running on an EC2 instance. A live status of our prod and test servers can be seen here.

IDEs -
Our client is developed on Visual Studio, which has nice support for working on VB.NET and XAML. 

Our server is developed on Visual Studio Code, which plays nicely with Typescript development.

Tools -

We provide you with any software that improves your productivity.  

1. Github Copilot (but we are happy to purchase any other software you feel makes you productive)!
2. ChatGPT/Claude

Do you want to help build a startup?

• If you do not want ambiguity or surprises, this role is not for you. We’re early-stage, and the journey is only going to be uphill. Expect things to be difficult and change unexpectedly.
• We work 6 days a week. As a small team trying to bring about a massive change, more hours means more work done (for now). This won’t continue indefinitely but for the foreseeable future, we don’t expect it to change. So if you’re currently looking to prioritize work-life balance, this role is not for you.
• You’ll be the one finding answers, watch those answers become redundant at some point, and then find new answers! You want ownership, in spirit and reality.
• You want to work in a high-trust environment. We prefer autonomy, and reach out to our teammates for help when needed. We want to work with people who enjoy a similar level of autonomy, and who we can trust to proactively communicate when help is needed.
• You are a very resourceful person, for whom there is no task below you. You try to find the best answer, but will get your hands dirty and get the job done when a straightforward answer isn’t apparent.

Your first 90 days

• Join us in ideating and building features to serve our existing customers
• Smooth out the rough edges in the product, create an amazing user onboarding experience
• Create workflows, including UIs and robust extensible data formats, for labelling data for AI and other search use cases. This will also involve you manually labelling some data with other team members to understand best practices.
• Design the product, talk to our customers, do lots of thinking and exploring, and play around with some wild ideas!

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone who -

• Has 2+ years of experience writing clean, modular object-oriented code
• Has 1+ years experience working with asynchronous programming and REST APIs
• Comfortable with basic Git
• Has experience with LLMs and playing around with prompts to get best results
• Has experience coming up with, and following good design patterns (logical class architectures, MVVM pattern, etc.)
• Can thoroughly test your code, and come up with all potential edge cases

It’d be more attractive to us if you also have -

• Have foundational knowledge of Computer Science (degree not needed, self-learning is also great!)
• Has experience working at an early stage startup (pre-seed/seed)
• Have built and launched a tool end-to-end that involved some UI like Android/iOS/Flutter/HTML-CSS etc. (a UNIQUE toy hobby project works as long as it's not a clone)
• Worked with GCP/AWS EC2/S3

Pay and benefits​

1. Cash: USD 24k–42k (₹20-35 lac INR) per annum
2. Equity: 0.5 - 1%, 4 year vesting period including a 1-year cliff.
   
   Note 1 - We have set up terms that are industry-leading in their friendliness to team members! If you leave Slidely, you will have 10 years from when they were granted to exercise them. Note that the exact deadline you have for exercise is whatever is written on your share options agreement under 'Expiration Date'. The industry standard is to only give you 90 days to exercise after leaving, which we think is bogus and unfair.
   
   Note 2 - We expect some of these terms like ESOPs, valuation, exercise window etc. might be alien so we are happy to explain them and answer any questions!  
3. We are open to adjusting the cash and equity proportions
4. We'll cover the basics: one-time relocation costs, workstation enhancements, software licenses you need, etc.

(If there's anything else we can do to make your work more enjoyable, just ask, we'll try.)