It is in this collaboration between people and algorithms that incredible scientific progress lies over the next few decades.
🤝 Good Morning and Welcome Back to Good People 🤝
A weekly newsletter for 36,500+ elite engineers, founders, and investors who watched OpenAI claim 52 > 69.
📆 This Week in the Newsletter 📆
🥳 Happy Friday! GPT-5 was released yesterday and the only place I saw mention of AGI was at the end of the sentence “It’s definitely not…”. So to celebrate six more weeks of startups needing engineers, we’ve got six new Hot Startups Hiring🔥, an interview with Perplexity’s founder, and a recent study on the reputational risk engineers face when using AI coding assistants at work.
📖 What We’re Reading: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work - A big tech company spent a fortune building a shiny new AI coding tool, expecting engineers to jump on board and productivity to skyrocket. Instead adoption was abysmal. Why? Turns out, using AI at work is like showing up to a potluck with store-bought cookies: people might judge you for not doing it “the hard way.”
🎧 What We’re Listening To: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search - Times are changing, and so are the ways people choose to search. At Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, Aravind Srinivas took the stage to discuss Perplexity’s strategy to build an AI-powered, agentic search browser. The days of Googling may be numbered.
Remember to forward this email to any friends who you think have what it takes to work at a tier-1 VC Backed Startup.
GPT-5 is so much less deceptive when creating graphs!
— #Max Spero (#@max_spero_)
5:54 PM • Aug 7, 2025
these gpt-5 numbers are insane 🤯
— #Rhys (#@RhysSullivan)
5:07 PM • Aug 7, 2025
👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇
🔥 Hot Startups Hiring🔥
👑 Startup #1 👑
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC, SEA, SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS
💸 Round/Funding: Series C, $160m
🏦 Investors: Databricks, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Snowflake, a16z
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup’s mission is to make world-class machine learning accessible to every company. They do this by offering a powerful platform that simplifies and accelerates the development and deployment of ML features—especially for real-time use cases.
🏗️ Product: This Startup is a feature platform for machine learning. It empowers data teams to build, manage, and serve ML features from batch and streaming data in real time—solving one of the hardest, most time-consuming parts of building production ML systems.
📣 Talking Points:
Built by the Uber Michelangelo team – elite engineering DNA.
Mission-critical adoption by high-growth companies for fraud detection, dynamic pricing, and personalization.
Live data, live decisions – powering real-time ML systems at scale.
🧑💻 Roles: Staff Software Engineer; Full Stack Engineer; Data Engineer
💸 Salary: $175k-250k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 2
🛠️ Startup #2 🛠️
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Automotive
💸 Round/Funding: Series B, $50M
🏦 Investors: General Catalyst
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building the AI operating system for logistics.
They’re automating unstructured, repetitive workflows across freight, logistics, and cold chain operations—helping the world’s most complex supply chains move faster, smarter, and with less human drag.
🏗️ Product: This Startup’s platform powers intelligent agents for logistics operations. These AI agents:
Parse unstructured documents like PDFs, BOLs, and pick slips
Automate quoting, broker portal navigation, and order workflows
Use RAG + RLHF to learn from humans-in-the-loop
Orchestrate end-to-end logistics ops across systems and people
The result? Full-stack AI automation that doesn’t just read data—but acts on it.
📣 Talking Points:
Real agents, real customers, real revenue.
The freight agent that never sleeps, This Startup's AI handles 300+ logistics docs daily, proving it's not just automation — it's transformation.
Built by ex-Retool, Google, and DoorDash engineers - The team has built tools used by millions. Now they’re focused on the $1T+ logistics backend—using browser automation, RAG, and human-in-the-loop learning to make AI agents that actually work.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Product Engineer; Senior Product Engineer; Senior Full Stack
💸 Salary: $200K – $265K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 4
🤖 Startup #3 🤖
🏙️ 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.
Users build adaptive automations with visual tools powered by agentic AI.
This Startup’s bots handle repetitive tasks that previously took teams of humans, syncing data, verifying insurance, managing shipments, processing invoices, and more—across outdated enterprise systems.
📣 Talking Points:
AI-Native RPA for Real Enterprises – Finally replacing legacy automation with intelligent agents across healthcare, logistics, and finance.
Insanely Fast Enterprise Sales – Six-figure deals closed in 30–45 days; unheard-of speed in enterprise software.
Stacked Team, Real Urgency – Revenue quadrupled, and customer demand is outpacing engineering capacity.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Back End; FDE (Forward Deployed); Senior Full Stack
💸 Salary: $120k - $250k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🛠️ Startup #4 🛠️
🏙️ 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:
Quantify worker productivity at the second-by-second level
Flag safety issues early
Deliver coaching insights to improve performance
Lay the foundation for insurance and robotics applications
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:
"Fantasy Football for Construction" – Real-time stats per worker that drive incentives, accountability, and faster timelines.
This Startup’s AI-powered wearables give superintendents real-time visibility into worker-level productivity—just like Formula 1 pit crew analytics, but for the $12T construction industry.
15,000+ hours of labeled construction footage with plans to scale to 5,000 hours daily—building the world’s most valuable construction dataset
🧑💻 Roles: Platform Engineer; Staff AI/ML
💸 Salary: $180K - $225K+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🤖 Startup #5 🤖
🏙️ Hiring Location: Remote
🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS
💸 Round/Funding: Series C, $131M+
🏦 Investors: Battery Ventures, Cisco, Datadog, Foundation Capital, Insight Partners, Microsoft, TCV
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: To make AI work, by providing the infrastructure to observe, evaluate, and improve AI systems at scale.
This Startup is building the gold standard for AI observability, empowering ML and LLM teams to troubleshoot and optimize their models with confidence.
🏗️ Product: This Startup is an AI observability and evaluation platform helping ML and LLM teams trace, evaluate, and improve their models across workflows. With real-time tracing and open-source tooling, This Startup makes debugging hallucinations, regressions, and blind spots scalable.
📣 Talking Points:
The Infrastructure Layer for Trustworthy AI: This Startup is becoming foundational to how AI gets deployed in the real world.
Strategic Validation: Series C backed by Microsoft, Datadog, PagerDuty—plus major enterprise adoption.
OSS + Scale = Rare Combo: Open-source ecosystem + trillions of events processed = engineering playground.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Product Engineer; Infrastructure Engineer; Senior Back End
💸 Salary: $150k-190K
🏦 Startup #6 🏦
🏙️ 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.
They’re embedding AI into workflows where it actually matters, starting with onboarding. Think: proposal gen, form automation, onboarding journeys… all evolving with an AI engine that learns from usage.
New AI pod: lean, fast, and shipping prototypes weekly. Next phase? Bake validated AI features into core product, end to end.
📣 Talking Points:
Vertical AI with real product velocity—AI tooling that doesn’t just demo well, it ships.
WealthTech that users actually love—4x adoption over legacy tools; described as “the most intuitive platform in 20 years.”
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Back End; AI / LLM Engineer
💸 Salary: $230K
🥷 Startup #7 🥷
🏙️ 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:
Rip-and-replace – This Startup is already replacing $200B incumbents at top AI companies.
Elite team, 10x velocity – Led by ex-Verkada founders and Harvard/Dartmouth engineers, shipping fast and scaling now.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE); Back End; Senior Product Engineer
💸 Salary: $160k - 280k+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
☁️ Startup #8 ☁️
🏙️ 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:
Converts zoning codes, market dynamics, and developer goals into feasible site designs
Generates 3D layouts, yield projections, and permit-ready docs in record time
Handles feasibility, site planning, and design automation for complex infill housing scenarios
Empowers developers to unlock housing on parcels that were once deemed too complex or unprofitable
This radically accelerates urban housing development—especially where traditional architecture can’t move fast or affordably enough.
📣 Talking Points:
This Startup tackles one of the hardest, most urgent problems in America, housing, by transforming site feasibility and architectural workflows with AI.
They’re not a SaaS company for architects. They are architects building software—giving them unmatched insight into regulatory logic, city workflows, and how design decisions actually get made.
Just 3 engineers today. New hires will work across 3D rendering, geospatial data, complex UI, and generative AI models—all in production, all day one.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack; Full Stack Engineer
💸 Salary: $140k - 200k+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: NONE
💸 Startup Engineering Compensation Calculator 💸
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