- first hire — product eng + part-time field FDE
- Strong architecture plus extroverted, wins over blue-collar techs
- ~0–5 years out of college; startup background, FDE+engineer ideal
- Source from home-services vertical SaaS or exceptional FDE shops
It's a customer-facing product-engineering role with an FDE hat worn part-time: because HVAC operators aren't technical and the incumbent software has failed them, a big part of the job is going to customers to train, teach, and onboard them, then turning messy, unstructured field feedback into product. Feroze was explicit that this is more a customer-facing product engineer than an FDE who happens to code — whoever they hire has to be comfortable talking directly to technicians and business owners, whether over calls or on-site.
Concretely, you'll spend some days in a truck with a plumber or HVAC tech watching how the product actually gets used, then head back to the NYC office to build. The deployments aren't complex and the users aren't technical, so this is less about deploying complicated systems and more about empathy, product sense, and translating what you see into good technical architecture. The founders worry least about coding itself (given agents) — the real bar is whether you can design a good architecture and win over a blue-collar technician in conversation.
What You'll Own
- Building the product end to end as a founding engineer — architecture that scales, features that ship
- Going to customers to train, teach, and onboard non-technical HVAC / home-services users (the part-time FDE hat)
- Turning unstructured field feedback into real product work
- Riding along with technicians to see the product in the wild and inform what to build next
- Chipping in on in-person outbound at conferences — meeting, greeting, building rapport
Requirements
- Strong engineer who can design good technical architectures — the real technical bar
- Genuine product sense — can translate messy customer feedback into what to build
- Ideally has been both an FDE and an engineer; at minimum, solid engineering experience
- Comfortable talking directly to customers and users, on calls or on-site — non-negotiable
- Extroverted; can carry a conversation with a blue-collar worker, banter, and build rapport
- Could sell the company and the product — the founders' "could this person pitch us?"
- Works hard; output over hours; not a nine-to-five
Background
- Startup experience, ideally early / zero-to-one
- Fewer than ~5 years out of college (not strict)
- Personality and a life outside engineering matter
Location and Visa
- Lives in New York; 5 days in office; possibly some Sundays
- No visa sponsorship — US citizens / green-card holders only; no OPT
Nice-to-Have
- Prior FDE at a home-services / trades / SMB-focused vertical SaaS company
- Prior FDE at a company known for strong FDE culture (Palantir-type)
- Comfort working with blue-collar or field users
- Conference / in-person selling experience
Who Will Thrive Here
- A product engineer who genuinely likes people — can spend a day in a truck with a plumber and enjoy it
- Someone who wants to be the founding engineer and own architecture and customer relationships from day one
- Extroverted, high-output, passionate about life beyond code
- Comfortable with a founder-intensity, output-driven culture and 5 days in the NYC office
- Excited by a massive, unsexy ($600B+) market where real technicians are badly underserved