Autograph helps sales & engineering leaders at growing companies build teams faster & better. We do this through a control panel to continuously manage headcount, updated real-time based on the HRIS & ATS:

1. VPs & CXOs can track budgets and spend forecasts, view additions & subtractions, make tradeoffs and transfers, understand capacity plans, and reallocate resources
2. Line managers get visibility into hiring pipeline, upcoming events, and can make requests for backfills or job reqs

We're a team of people who deeply understand the mechanics of company-building. We've restructured organizations and compensation for Fortune 500 companies at BCG. We built HR, finance, and legal workflows at AbstractOps, and managed the back office for 200+ companies (including early stage startups like On Deck, Maven, Airplane, Primer).

We're backed by VCs & angels who were early investors of AngelList, Docker, Front, HelloSign, Instacart, DraftKings, Pillpack, Checkr, Human Interest, BetterUp, Mercury, Amplitude, and many more iconic companies.

We’re looking for an elite senior IC who has architected meaningful systems — level is flexible and depends on the candidate, but we're looking for someone at the ~Principal Engineer level (we're open to either Staff Engineers or scaling up to Chief Architect / CTO for the right person).

This person has probably either

1. been a founder / CTO,
2. been a founding engineer at a company that scaled to Series B+, or
3. built 0-to-1 products at elite engineering organizations (e.g., Coinbase, Figma, Airtable, Stripe).

Hiring Logistics

We strongly prefer (paid) work trials -- 2-3 weeks working together on a project. We find it's the best way to tell what it would be like to simulate our working relationship in steady state. So the "interview process" is pretty quick: 2-3 video calls over the span of a couple of days.

Compensation: we dogfood https://fairoffer.ai, but as a quick reference

• Staff Engineer: ~$150-180K and 2-5%
• Principal Engineer: $180K+ and 4%+
• CTO: $TBD and 10%+

What a great candidate looks like

We're looking for an elite senior engineer. If that's you, you'll be responsible for (as much as you'd like of) the technical strategy & design, owning tradeoffs, and increasing teamwide velocity. You'll work closely with our cofounders Hari (CEO), Loubna (Engineering), Barbara (Product & Design).

The ideal archetype is someone who probably has a chip on their shoulder or entrepreneurial itch, and was considering starting a company... but would be open to joining the right company and team IF they could get a sizeable piece of the equity and a seat at the table.

We're optimizing for:

• Someone who wants to spend 75%+ of their time coding and building for the foreseeable future
• Raw horsepower (if someone has called you "the best engineer I've ever worked with")
• Someone who is terrific at pattern matching and can think several steps ahead intuitively when making tradeoffs
• Those who exhibit intense curiosity about new topics, especially disciplines that combine art and science, intuition and data
• Early stage startup experience
• Can be a talent magnet when we grow the team
• Someone who values speed (moving fast and learning even if we make some wrong choices) over velocity (getting it exactly right the first time)
• Embody an obsession with solving customer problems effectively, while upholding high standards for reliability & security

There isn't one profile; but examples of great candidates might be:

• A Staff / Senior Staff Engineer at a mature company with a high quality engineering culture (Stripe, Coinbase, Airtable, Figma) who has architected complex systems 0-to-1
• A former CTO / technical cofounder at a startup
• Founding engineer of a company that has seen some measure of success (e.g., Series B+)

Bonuses:

• Familiarity with our stack (Typescript, Node.js, React, Postgres, AWS, Render, Prisma, Synadia)
• Experience with building data pipelines / analytics products
• Prior experience with HR & Finance software

Probably not a fit:

• If you have <5 years of experience
• If you just have experience at a big company (be it Fortune 500 or FAANG)
• If your greatest strength is being a people manager
• If it's been longer than a year since you were actively coding