Founding Engineer

Detail is building an AI engineer to solve technical debt. We're hiring founding engineers.

What We're Building

We're starting with writing tests. For a typical codebase, Detail can write thousands of new tests, all merge-quality, in the form of completed PRs. The tests pass, resolve a gap in test coverage, reuse testing libraries from elsewhere in the repo, and conform to codebase style. Our customers are merging hundreds of PRs generated this way.

We think this is the missing foundation for AI engineering. AI engineers are going to be limited by questions like: can we trust this change? Can we make changes safely, in general? How do we know if this PR has unintended consequences?

Testing is the unlock. If you can test well enough, you can automate a lot of other software engineering work. This is especially true if you're trying to change how software is implemented without changing its behavior – i.e. most work to resolve tech debt.

Why

We got into software because we liked making things, but we found the reality of professional software engineering to be disappointing:

• spending weeks on simple features because we needed to cut across legacy code
• having meetings to find out if a change is safe
• multi-quarter projects to unwind a technical decision someone made years ago
• building the wrong features because the right features would require cutting through a "haunted forest" of poorly-understood legacy code

Every engineer should have the joy of a productive codebase, and it shouldn't take a rewrite to get there. This is only going to matter more as AI assistants accelerate every aspect of our work.

The first step is manufacturing good tests at scale, and from there we'll be able to pay down massive chunks of technical debt, safely and autonomously.

Who We're Looking For

We would love to get to know you, especially if:

• You like speed, and you're excited about the prospect of being on a small, high-performing team. You're comfortable making pragmatic choices with imperfect information and learning from contact with reality.
• You want to build a company from the ground up. We intend for anyone we hire at this stage to play a major role in shaping everything we do: the product, the team we build, and the company's direction.
• You're not afraid of reading a lot of code. Building this product requires a lot of schlepping. We need to manually, subjectively review dozens of generated pull requests within customer codebases to find the problems with our product and evaluate improvements. We read a lot of code. We make a lot of spreadsheets. It's the only way. (But it is working!)
• You're opinionated about devtools. You have favorite tools. You're the person who teaches your team about better ways to do things. You have opinions about what software-building should look like in five years.

Get in touch! We'd love to meet you: [email protected]

About Us

Dan was previously CTO at Heap, where he worked on everything from building the initial version of the product to leading the engineering org and incubating follow-on products.

The founding team is ex- Glean, Heap, Palantir, Nuro, and Amazon.

We're a seed stage company funded by Conviction, OpenAI, Neo, Guillermo Rauch, Olivier Pomel, Dev Ittycheria, Christina Cacioppo, Arash Ferdowsi, Alex Graveley, FYSK, and many other outstanding people.

We're based in SF and we operate in-person.