Founding engineer

At Upshift, we believe engineering teams will be automating grunt work and chores with AI in the coming years. We’re working on a platform to make that possible. Our customers use us to handle things like dependency upgrades and tech debt campaigns.

Our team is small (1 founder + 2 eng contractors). Adam (founder) is an ex-Palantir engineering lead. We are remote-first. We want every person who joins us to take pride in being at Upshift: the caliber of the team, the impact we have on our customers, and the quality of the product.

Upshift is pre-PMF with several early customers, so our next year is most oriented around making something our customers really want. We’ve raised from investors like Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Transpose, and many participating angels.

Why you should work here

• High trust and autonomy: You’ll have ownership over meaningful projects from day one, with the freedom to shape technical decisions and influence product direction. We trust engineers to figure out the best path forward.
• Live in the future: You help us define what software engineering will become in the next decade. Space to imagine, experiment, and explore is baked in to how we operate.
• Deliver real AI value: If you’re tired of AI over-hype and false promises, you’re one of us. Help Upshift cut through the noise for our customers.
• Culture beats strategy: Upshift is a place for people who care about their work and care about other things too. We're not looking for one-dimensional personalities or work drones. Show up, put in the effort when you're working, and then feel comfortable turning off.

What you’ll do

Our north star right now is finding product-market fit. That means making something people want. We need your help for things like:

• Building customer features: our product consists of use case-driven bots to focus on things like test coverage, integrations with tools like Github, and platform features to help human engineers understand how Upshift is contributing. You’ll oversee the architecture, design, deployment, and customer adoption of these features.
• Forward-deployed customer delivery: we’ll never stop talking with our customers to understand how things are going, how we can help, etc. You’ll take customer-facing meetings to understand their problems and turn it into direction for how we should make our product better.
• Keeping culture our secret sauce: our culture is what unifies our direction when strategy needs to evolve and adapt. By being a founding employee, you will be a key player in how we define ourselves at the start.

What we’re looking for

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent
• 3+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong communicator and autonomous operator; comfortable solving technical problems with customers
• TypeScript + React proficient
• (bonus) Effect proficient
• (bonus) AI proficient (prompting skills, evals, guardrails, etc.)

Stand out with a link to a project and video of you explaining what it is, the problem it solves, who it’s for, and how it works

Benefits

• Competitive base salary for early-stage opportunity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited vacation
• Team off-sites

About the interview

• 1 technical screen
• 2 interviews: a behavioral interview and an additional technical interview