Founding Engineer

The Problem

Resumes are rapidly becoming obsolete. AI-enhanced applications are flooding hiring pipelines, making it impossible for companies to identify truly qualified candidates among thousands of submissions. Meanwhile, professionals struggle to showcase their full potential beyond a static resume. The hiring sector remains tethered to this outdated system, and even AI solutions are hitting a ceiling on what they can achieve with limited resume data. It's time for a new approach to hiring.

About Ref

Ref is an AI-Native hiring platform designed to address the challenges faced by hiring teams AND candidates in today's AI-enhanced application landscape.

For hiring teams we provide advanced predictive talent and hiring tools that tackle their most pressing hiring needs. Our platform streamlines the candidate screening process, transforming it into an efficient, data-driven operation that significantly reduces time-to-hire while improving the quality of matches.

Complementing our company-focused tools, we're developing a comprehensive professional history platform for job seekers. This includes creating persistent profiles validated by references, with detailed professional histories, and integrations with platforms like GitHub, design portfolios, and other sources that provide insight into a professional's history. This approach will furnish hiring teams with a substantially richer dataset to analyze, offering deeper insights into candidates' skills, experiences, and potential fit beyond what traditional resumes can provide and automate the painful process of custom resume tailoring for every application.

By connecting what companies need to know with what candidates can meaningfully showcase, Ref is building a more transparent, efficient, and effective hiring landscape. Our goal is to facilitate optimal connections between talent and opportunities, benefiting both hiring teams and job seekers in the process.

Our Traction

We have developed a fully operational AI candidate screening platform that is currently being used by a major tech company with a global presence. Our product has moved well beyond the MVP stage and is actively streamlining hiring processes in a real-world, enterprise environment. Building on this success, we are rapidly expanding our functionality to include AI-native assisted interview preparation, a sophisticated candidate outreach CRM, and intelligent new hire onboarding tools. Our stack leverages AI and cloud technologies, including Python, FastAPI, Postgres, AWS, LlamaIndex, React, Anthropic and integrations with leading AI inference providers.

What We're Looking For

We're seeking a curious, committed, and hacker-minded engineer to join the team and assist our development efforts. You'd work on the development of our core products, potentially impacting both the company and professional sides of our platform. As an early team member you would be ready to wear any hat that is needed.

• Hacker mindset: You're an excellent coder, love to tinker, and are a generalist who can build an end-to-end tool. You're a nerd who we could go win hackathons with. We prefer a skillset founded in Python.
• AI expertise: You are familiar and involved with the latest transformer models: LLMs, Vector Databases, Agentic Functionality, RAG, LLM Frameworks, etc. are things you have been diving into.
• Relevant experience: We're not going to put a number on the years of experience you have. Have you worked at a startup before? Do you regularly engage with domain experts? Are you a regular contributor to an open source community? We want to set you up for success to lead a huge initiative, so you tell us what you've done that shows off that you can do this.
• Empathetic: We love hackers but we also value empathy and the ability to work well with others.