Founding Engineer

Who we are

We’re building the world’s first “sub-resource” cost monitoring platform to help software companies gain control of their profit margins. Our platform is “sub-resource” capable: for servers, databases, third-party APIs, and other resources shared by multiple customers, it accurately determines which customers incurred which costs on any given resource.

We’re accustomed to seeing an itemized bill every time we make a purchase at the grocery store, dentist, car mechanic, etc. But most tech companies lack this kind of detailed cost information for their largest expenses: cloud and third-party API costs. Virtually none of them knows how much each of its teams, customers or features costs, especially for shared resources (i.e., multi-tenancy - common for large SaaS businesses). This causes many problems, including:

• Poor understanding of what factors drive customer costs, leading to some contracts priced too high (lost deals) and some too low (bad margins)
• No idea how different features and functions contribute to overall costs, preventing code-level inefficiencies from being found and fixed
• Poor internal cost accountability, leading to wasteful spending

For years, while money was cheap, this wasn’t a big problem. But now, as funding is getting tighter and costs are increasing due to AI features, we’re seeing many companies focus on margins with renewed importance. Profitability is the only way to guarantee that a business survives. Rosettic’s goal is to facilitate this transition and pave the way for sustainable AI businesses.

Rosettic’s founders, Adam (CTO) and Micah (CEO), met their freshman year of Stanford and have been friends ever since. Adam developed his technical skills at Apple and Palantir, while Micah developed his sales and strategy skills at BCG and as a sales rep for software startups.

Who we’re looking for

The ideal applicant has:

• 5+ years of professional, full-time backend software engineering experience
• Experience deploying and/or managing infrastructure on a cloud provider such as GCP/AWS/Azure
• Ability to work in-person in San Francisco four days per week
• A sense of humor and humility

Any of these are a plus (in order of importance):

• Systems programming experience and a solid understanding of major Linux kernel subsystems (experience with eBPF is extra awesome)
• Experience building event streaming pipelines at significant scale using technologies like Timescale, Kafka, and Druid
• Some frontend and UI/UX design experience, especially with TypeScript/NextJS

What you’ll build

A big reason we’re so excited to be working on Rosettic is that, on the technical side, it’s much more than “yet another SaaS web app.” We’re pushing eBPF to its limits to collect custom, highly detailed metrics from inside in the Linux kernel; combining this with purpose-built distributed tracing; and aggregating the result into real-time cost data, all while keeping overhead low for our customers.

Here’s our roadmap for the next 6 months, which you’ll be instrumental in delivering on time:

• Support for more technologies. Our first release supports bare metal servers, Docker, Kubernetes, and Postgres. But many clients are asking for integrations with common tech like message queues, NoSQL, even OpenAI APIs, etc. Each one presents its own challenge for seamless, performant instrumentation.
• Even more granular data. Our combined tracing and metrics show clients where the biggest costs are, but we can collect more data to help them directly fix inefficiencies. We’ll use eBPF-based continuous profiling to build memory and CPU flame graphs which sit alongside our cost data. Clients will use these flame graphs to discover and fix specific lines of code that use too much memory and CPU.
• Real-time alerts on crazy specific criteria. With the data we collect, we can easily support requests like “Alert me when any customer incurs more than $5,000 in Postgres costs within a month” or “Notify me when the average cost per invocation of the POST /createUser endpoint exceeds 0.7 cents”.
• Dashboard for non-technical users. Our earliest clients are cost-savvy CTOs who want direct access to the raw data, but we’ll soon need to build a UI to support our finance users. You’ll help us iterate on the look and feel of our app, as well as design a user experience that makes our complex data easily understandable and queryable by laypeople.

Why work with us?

You likely have many options for work, and we’re thrilled that you’ve made it this far with us. In addition to competitive salary and equity compensation and benefits, some reasons you might choose to work with us include:

• Opportunity to build a groundbreaking new product with novel technology
• Opportunity to define the culture of what could soon be a large company
• Help tech companies weather the macroeconomic storm with fewer layoffs
• One badass company retreat each year. This year we’re thinking Lake Como.
• Founders are recent college grads and therefore aren’t steeped in the latest management gimmicks taught at the business schools or practiced by big tech. We’re committed to working with you in whatever way proves best.