dangoldin

RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.

We’re a lean (4 people, 3 of which are engineers), bootstrapped team building a private-equity automation platform (deal analysis, document processing, chat, investment theme research). Shipping fast, learning daily, and looking for hands-on engineers who want outsized impact.

- Stack: React Router 7/React 19, shadcn/Tailwind v4, Node/TypeScript (strict), PostgreSQL + Prisma + pgvector, S3; AI workflows with embeddings & LLMs.

- Why join: small team with direct ownership of core product, zero bureaucracy, Greenfield decisions and ability to learn extremely quickly, you’ll ship to paying users weekly.

AI / Full-Stack Engineer

- Own features end-to-end: data ingestion → AI pipelines → UI. - Design and tune LLM/embedding flows; keep latency/cost in check. - Requirements: strong TypeScript/Node, modern React, SQL + data modeling; comfort evaluating/using AI models; bias to ship.

Forward Deployed Engineer

- Work directly with customers (PE analysts/partners) to turn messy workflows into productized features. - Rapidly prototype, measure impact, harden for production. - Requirements: full-stack chops, great product sense, calm under ambiguity, willing to jump between code, data, and customer calls.

Happy to also talk to the self-taught. We care more about ability than credentials and value slope over intercept.

How to apply: Email [email protected] with “HN – [Role]” in the subject, a short note on something you’ve shipped, and any links (GitHub/portfolio). No recruiters.

Lesson here is that your approach will depend on your industry and peers. Every market will have their won philosophy and requirements here.