🤝 Good Morning and Welcome Back to Good People 🤝

A weekly newsletter for 38,000+ elite engineers, founders, and investors who whispered, “hell yeah” when they heard Daniel Day-Lewis is back.

🥳 Happy Friday! Meta has pressed pause on its AI hiring, people REALLY love the old ChatGPT 4o model, and we’re still taking FDE referrals!

What’s an FDE? Think half software engineer, half problem-solving consultant. FDEs parachute directly into a customer’s world to implement tech that actually automates real work. Unlike product engineers building features for thousands of users, an FDE embeds with one client to fix their gnarly workflows using new tech.

Why now? Because for 99% of companies, adopting AI is hard. Only ~1% of firms are fully “AI mature”, and the rest are struggling to implement all the fancy models coming out. FDEs are the bridge between AI theory and practice. At the RAISE AI conference in Paris, founders candidly noted that the difference between an AI pilot and a real deployment often comes down to how quickly forward-deployed engineers can make it work on-site.

Know any sharp 0-3 year engineers who can code AND handle customers

We’d love to meet them!

Your referral gets hired = you get up to $2,000

⭐️ Just reply to this email and make sure to CC your referral. ⭐️

📖 What We’re Reading: Meta Freezes AI Hiring as Surging Costs Raise Concerns. Well‑sourced breakdown of Meta’s AI freeze, its hiring techniques, and investor pressure points. A must-read for understanding the slowing momentum behind AI headcounts and what that signals for market sentiment.

🎧 What We’re Listening To: The head of ChatGPT on AI attachment, ads, and what’s next. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, dives into the rollout of GPT-5, model deprecation, and the surprising emotional attachment users have to AI. Like it or not, people are getting familiar with certain models, and Nick faced a ton of backlash when people lost access to 4o.

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI

💸 Round/Funding: Seed

🏦 Investors: YC, Google's Gradient Ventures, Daybreak Ventures

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building self-improving consumer software that autonomously generates, tests, and optimizes app experiences - driving revenue, conversion, and retention without manual intervention. The goal: a future where consumer apps manage themselves, continuously evolving to outperform the competition while founders sleep.

🏗️ Product: This Startup automates the entire feature lifecycle, from idea to live deployment - using advanced AI.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Founding Full Stack Engineer; Full Stack (Front End emphasis); Full Stack (Back End emphasis)

💸 Salary: $150k-250k 

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 6

🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC

🛠️ Industry: AI, Cybersecurity

💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $20M

🏦 Investors: Ballistic Ventures, Charles River, Goldcrest Capital (first investors in SpaceX), Mantis Ventures, Shrug Ventures, Slow Ventures

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Thoughtful Cyber Agents for Identity. This Startup is protecting the digital presence of the world’s largest brands, businesses and IP.

🏗️ Product: AI agents secure modern attach surfaces with advanced search, real-time threat classification, and automated response.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Front End; Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Senior Front End

💸 Salary: $170k - $210K

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI, Legal

💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $60M

🏦 Investors: Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures, a16z

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is the leader in AI for Plaintiff Law, helping them take on more cases and increase revenue

🏗️ Product: This Startup is legal AI for plaintiff litigation firms. She handles the heavy lifting of a case - from intake through resolution. Built on top of a case intelligence engine, This Startup ingests all case information from legal business and communication systems and uses it to perform a wide variety of legal work including document analysis and legal document drafting.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Senior Back End; Staff Software Engineer; Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

💸 Salary: $200k - $300k

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 3

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building the AI-powered productivity platform for construction. By outfitting workers with body-worn cameras and combining human labeling with AI vision models, This Startup helps job site leaders manage performance, cut costs, and unlock real productivity—treating labor like a coached sport, not a black box. The goal? Real-time visibility, faster decisions, and safer, smarter sites.

🏗️ Product: This Startup combines AI wearables, custom labeling infrastructure, and a real-time analytics dashboard to capture and interpret field-level construction data. Workers wear cameras embedded into hard hats or bodycams. The footage is streamed via Starlink, labeled using This Startup’s internal platform, and processed with computer vision models to:

The system offers COOs a kind of “fantasy football dashboard” for their workforce—finally bringing measurable metrics to a $12T global construction industry still running on PDFs and guesswork.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Platform Engineer; Staff AI/ML

💸 Salary: $180K - $225K+

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC

🛠️ Industry: AI Models

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: To reinvent robotic process automation (RPA) with intelligent agents, making enterprise workflows faster, more adaptive, and vastly more accessible across legacy industries.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is building the next-gen RPA platform—AI-native and no-code.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Back End; FDE (Forward Deployed); Senior Full Stack

💸 Salary: $120k - $250k

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC

🛠️ Industry: AI, Fintech, SaaS

💸 Round/Funding: Series A

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Deliver magical financial moments to everyone—investors, advisors, and clients alike.

This Startup is becoming the client experience layer of financial services—like Spotify or Uber, but for finance. Seamless, smart, and built around the end user.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is a vertical SaaS platform powering investment proposals and onboarding for financial advisors.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Back End; AI / LLM Engineer

💸 Salary: $230K

🏙️ Hiring Location: SF

🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS

💸 Round/Funding: Seed

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building the AI platform for internal IT and security teams—eliminating the help desk and letting people focus on work that actually matters.

Vision is to reinvent IT ops by making it easier to automate a task forever than to do it manually once. This Startup aims to replace legacy incumbents with a smarter, AI-native platform purpose-built for modern tech companies.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is an AI-native internal automation platform that helps IT and security teams eliminate manual workflows.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE); Back End; Senior Product Engineer

💸 Salary: $160k - 280k+

🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5

🏙️ Hiring Location: Remote

🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup’s mission is to make it radically easier to build housing in U.S. cities. By merging deep infill expertise with a generative AI platform, they empower developers to bring high-quality, code-compliant homes to market faster, cheaper, and more predictably.

Their long-term vision is to streamline the preconstruction stack—feasibility, design, permitting—so cities can unlock desperately needed housing at scale.

🏗️ Product: This Startup is a full-service architecture firm + generative AI platform that helps developers quickly answer: “What can I build on this lot?”

Core functionality:

This radically accelerates urban housing development—especially where traditional architecture can’t move fast or affordably enough.

📣 Talking Points:

🧑‍💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Full Stack Engineer

💸 Salary: $140k - 200k+

🚙 Days Required Onsite: NONE