Founding Software Engineer — Ryvn

Team version — for recruiters submitting to David Houston. No recruiter pay/bounty information is included. All evaluation guidance is retained.

• →1+ years of experience as a fullstack, backend, or infra engineer that's built 01 [Required]

• Experience building devtools or deployment infrastructure tooling [Must have]
• Owned product development end-to-end (0 to 1) [Must have]
• Experience at a high-growth, VC-backed startup [Strongly preferred]

• Undergrad in CS [Must have]

• Proficient across the stack [Must have]
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure) [Must have]
• Experience with Go (Golang) [Strongly preferred]

• High iteration velocity suitable for an early-stage startup [Required]

• Looking for trajectory/slope in career [Required]

• Career experience limited to configuring systems (e.g., some DevOps roles)
• Engineers from large enterprise backgrounds who prefer stability

Salary$200K–$250KEquity0.5–2%On-site policy5 days in-office in New York CityVisa sponsorshipNot availableEmployment typeFull-timeLocationNew York, NY

1. Describe the most complex or challenging technical product you've built from 01.
2. What motivates you to join a company at this stage, and how do you thrive in such a fast-paced environment?
3. Describe your experience building devtools.
4. Can the candidate be on-site? If not, is the candidate willing to relocate?
5. What is their salary expectation?
6. How actively is this candidate exploring new opportunities?

Updated Mar 12, 2026

Target companies Ramp, Render, Datadog, Netflix, Uber, Databricks, Vercel, Railway

Ideal companies Scale AI

Additional dev tooling companies Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Lovable, Sourcegraph, Render, Supabase, Retool, Qodo

Note: No "Show all X companies" expander was present in the source, so no collapsed company count was detected. Confirm whether any lists were truncated before relying on this as complete.

For reference only — do not source these specific profiles.

Adam DeHovitz — LinkedIn Normal Engineer | Brooklyn, United States

• Strong infra engineer at top companies

Matthew Binshtok — LinkedIn Software Engineer at Vercel | New York, United States

• Strong company experience (high-growth, VC-backed)
• Experience building 01

• Devtools/Deployment Tooling Must-Have: Prioritize candidates with clear 01 track records in building devtools or deployment infrastructure — merely configuring third-party tools isn't enough.
• Founding/High-Velocity Mindset: Focus on engineers who have owned full system design and execution in early-stage, agile environments rather than those from enterprise backgrounds.
• Full-Stack & Go Expertise: Ensure candidates demonstrate full-stack fluency with strong, hands-on coding in Go and deep Kubernetes/cloud infrastructure experience, not just operational roles.

By volume, the dominant recorded rejection reason is "Candidate lacks experience building developer tools or infrastructure tooling" — this devtools/infra-tooling gap is the single most consistent HM disqualifier across the rejected pipeline.