Ryvn — Founding Software Engineer

Team version — for recruiters submitting to David Houston. No recruiter pay/bounty information is included. All evaluation guidance is retained.

Type: Full-time | On-site | New York, NY Compensation: $200K–$250K + 0.5–2% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: Not available Reports to: Albert Lam, Co-founder / CEO

About Ryvn

Ryvn builds the deployment infrastructure that powers mission-critical software in industries where reliability matters most — healthcare, finance, and manufacturing. They help AI startups deploy into enterprise clouds: enterprises want AI solutions but don't want data leaving their network, so Ryvn brings the software to them, deploying inside customers' secure environments rather than centralized cloud. The founders ran customer deployments at Palantir across hundreds of environments in healthcare, finance, defense, and the Fortune 100.

Founded: 2024 | Team size: 5 employees | Total funding: $2M (YC-backed, seed) Industry: Software Development, AI, Enterprise, Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, Devtools Website: ryvn.ai Office: New York, NY

Why Candidates Should Join

• Founding-engineer scope: Work side-by-side with the founders to shape Ryvn's technical architecture, product roadmap, and engineering culture, building foundational systems from first principles.
• YC-backed with serious pedigree: Seed-stage Y Combinator company; team drawn from Palantir, Vercel, and Capital One, blending distributed systems, developer platforms, and enterprise software.
• Hard technical problems with real-world impact: Design distributed systems that orchestrate software deployment across hundreds of production environments in critical industries.
• Comp + ownership: $200K–$250K base plus 0.5–2% equity, with full end-to-end ownership and the autonomy to ship fast.

Intake Call Summary

• Founding Engineer focused on deployment infrastructure for B2B SaaS companies; build and push features to production from day one, working across the stack.
• Must-have skills: Kubernetes, cloud technologies, and experience building infrastructure tools. Preferred: GoLang, full-stack experience, passion for building secure systems.
• Compensation discussed as $190K–$250K base with 0.5–2% equity (note: role details table lists $200K–$250K — see flag below).
• Work arrangement: onsite in NYC, Monday–Friday, with some weekend flexibility.
• Pain points: bottlenecked on product development; hard to find candidates with both cloud experience and hands-on building skills.
• Ideal candidate: zero-to-one product development, strong technical skills, startup readiness, interest in secure software deployment.
• Interview process: intro chat, technical interview(s), and a flexible work trial (duration flexible to accommodate currently employed candidates).
• Stated intent at intake was to hire three engineers ASAP (note: current role highlights and hiring count list 1 — see flag below).

The Role

As a Founding Software Engineer, you'll design and build distributed systems that transform how organizations deploy and manage software at scale, owning problems end-to-end and shipping code that runs in production across healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.

What You'll Be Doing

• Build at scale: Design, build, and maintain highly available systems that orchestrate software deployment across hundreds of production environments.
• Shape the foundation: Work directly with the founding team to define Ryvn's technical direction and architecture.
• Solve and streamline: Identify inefficiencies and design elegant solutions, with the autonomy to ship fast.
• Own complex systems: Debug performance issues across distributed systems, from backend services to production infrastructure.
• Balance tradeoffs: Navigate engineering decisions thoughtfully, balancing short-term velocity with long-term scalability.

Tech stack: Kubernetes, Cloud (AWS/GCP). Nice-to-haves across Go, TypeScript, React, Postgres, S3, Helm, Docker, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi).

Qualifications

Seniority

• 1+ years of experience as a fullstack, backend, or infra engineer that's built 01 [Required]

Work Experience

• Experience building devtools or deployment infrastructure tooling [Must have]
• Owned product development end-to-end (0 to 1) [Must have]
• Experience at a high-growth, VC-backed startup [Strongly preferred]

Education

• Undergrad in CS [Must have]

Hard Skills

• Proficient across the stack [Must have]
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure) [Must have]
• Experience with Go (Golang) [Strongly preferred]

Soft Skills

• High iteration velocity suitable for an early-stage startup [Required]

Miscellaneous

• Looking for trajectory/slope in career [Required]

Traits to Avoid

• Career experience limited to configuring systems (e.g., some DevOps roles)
• Engineers from large enterprise backgrounds who prefer stability

Role Details

Salary$200K–$250KEquity0.5–2%On-site policy5 days in-office in New York CityVisa sponsorshipNot availableEmployment typeFull-timeLocationNew York, NY

Screening Questions

1. Describe the most complex or challenging technical product you've built from 01.
2. What motivates you to join a company at this stage, and how do you thrive in such a fast-paced environment?
3. Describe your experience building devtools.
4. Can the candidate be on-site? If not, is the candidate willing to relocate?
5. What is their salary expectation?
6. How actively is this candidate exploring new opportunities?

Interview Process

Stage 1 — Submit candidate After submitting, you'll be notified if the hiring manager wants to proceed.

Stage 2 — Intro Chat (20 min)

Stage 3 — Technical Interview (1 hour)

Stage 4 — [Optional] Second Technical Interview

Stage 5 — Paid Work Trial (1–3 days) Duration flexible to accommodate currently employed candidates.

Stage 6 — Offer Extended

Stage 7 — Candidate Hired

Ideal Companies & Backgrounds

Updated Mar 12, 2026

Target companies Ramp, Render, Datadog, Netflix, Uber, Databricks, Vercel, Railway

Ideal companies Scale AI

Additional dev tooling companies Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Lovable, Sourcegraph, Render, Supabase, Retool, Qodo

Note: No "Show all X companies" expander was present in the source, so no collapsed company count was detected. Confirm whether any lists were truncated before relying on this as complete.

Ideal Candidate Profiles

For reference only — do not source these specific profiles.

Adam DeHovitz — LinkedIn Normal Engineer | Brooklyn, United States

• Strong infra engineer at top companies

Matthew Binshtok — LinkedIn Software Engineer at Vercel | New York, United States

• Strong company experience (high-growth, VC-backed)
• Experience building 01

Rejected Candidate Feedback

• Devtools/Deployment Tooling Must-Have: Prioritize candidates with clear 01 track records in building devtools or deployment infrastructure — merely configuring third-party tools isn't enough.
• Founding/High-Velocity Mindset: Focus on engineers who have owned full system design and execution in early-stage, agile environments rather than those from enterprise backgrounds.
• Full-Stack & Go Expertise: Ensure candidates demonstrate full-stack fluency with strong, hands-on coding in Go and deep Kubernetes/cloud infrastructure experience, not just operational roles.

By volume, the dominant recorded rejection reason is "Candidate lacks experience building developer tools or infrastructure tooling" — this devtools/infra-tooling gap is the single most consistent HM disqualifier across the rejected pipeline.