Senior Software engineer, Founding team

About us

Software engineering is being fundamentally transformed by AI, and we're building the tools to lead that shift. Aviator is creating the engineering productivity supertools that will define how the best teams build software in the AI era.We as strongly believe that we can provide developers with super powers to build faster and better by solving the challenges that they face everyday.

We believe the future of software development isn't engineers replaced by AI-it's engineers supercharged by it. Small teams will ship what once required hundreds of people. Complex workflows that took days will complete in minutes. We're building that future.

Backed by Y Combinator (S21), we're a small, focused team in San Francisco tackling one of the most important problems in tech: making every engineer dramatically more effective. We are a team of ex-Googlers with background building engineering teams at several fast-growing silicon valley startups.

Our platform already powers workflow automation at Slack, Figma, DoorDash, Square and other industry leaders. Square. MergeQueue eliminates merge conflicts and broken builds. FlexReview intelligently routes code reviews. And Runbooks-our newest product-is a collaborative AI agent platform that lets engineering teams automate complex workflows through natural language specs and shared context.

About the role

We are looking for early engineers to join our nimble team to build the initial product alongside the founders. This person will be an extension to us, the founders, and have the same voice on the table. We think of early engineers as having the ethos of being a founder themselves.

An ideal candidate has a unique mix of software expertise, domain knowledge, and execution driven mindset.

What you will do

• Work closely with the users to understand their development needs and use cases to guide our roadmap. Ensure customer needs are supported by broader engineering team through effective prioritization.
• Build prototypes all the way to final products. Solve complex issues for our users.
• Collaborate with our founders to gather requirements through detailed technical discussions and brainstorming sessions.
• Explore new product development areas driven by strategic understanding of users landscape.
• Take ownership and drive initiatives for segments within the product.

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Shipped full-stack products before - whether it was in your day job or projects outside of work.
• Experience working in low-structure environment, comfortable working with unknowns.
• Passion for building engineering tools, excited about solving problems for engineers.
• Strong communication skills.
• Previous experience building internal engineering tools a plus.
• 5+ years of professional experience

Why you should join us

• Have an impact from day 1. You will be working very closely with the founders everyday.
• Solve your own problems, as a software engineer, you get to solve problems that you face everyday
• Own the product - drive the product vision, participate in building the early team and work closely with the users.

Benefits

• Health/Dental/Vision
• Unlimited vacation policy
• Transparency - we overshare all investor and company updates with everyone

We are specifically looking for engineers who can see inefficiencies in today’s developer workflows and want to improve developer experience for everyone. These engineers are self-motivated and opinionated about developer experience. We believe in the ethos of "Strong opinions loosely held".

Our interview process is designed to find these kinds of engineers. Moreover, we try to ask questions that are relevant to the types of products we build. Below is what to expect in our interview process.

Intro call

Get to know the product, vision and see if this will be a good fit

First technical screen

This technical interview will be one hour long. You bring your own coding environment. You may use any programming language, coding agent, and editor. We evaluate the ability to understand the problem, collaborate with the agent and critique the code generated.

Take home project

After the first screen, we give you a take home assignment which is meant to evaluate your critical thinking and ability to build something from scratch. You are allowed to use your preferred tools, coding agents, and use your preferred language.

Technical interviews

We love to do all technical interviews in a similar fashion. Depending on your timeline and our teams availability, these may be scheduled back to back or spaced out. You should expect a total of 3-4 technical interviews with a mix of programming + system design questions. Each interview is 1 hour long, with 45mins for technical question and 15 mins for Q&A.

All interviews involve you doing a screenshare of your IDE. We would recommend using your preferred IDE and your preferred programming language. You may also use your preferred coding agents. The goal here is to see how would you solve such problems in a typical workday.

References

We strongly weigh on references and would ask for 2 references during or after the interviews. Please provide references of the folks you have directly worked with before - your former teammates, manager, etc.

Timeline

We typically work with your timeline, we have even extended offers to the right candidates in a couple of days.