Software engineer, Forward Deployed

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 an early fullstack engineer to join our nimble team and build the product alongside the founders in SF. This person will be an extension of us, the founders, and have the same voice at the table. We think of early engineers as having the ethos of being a founder themselves.

This role has a twist. Most of your time is spent building—shipping features, prototypes and full products in our codebase. But a meaningful slice of it, roughly a week or two a month, is spent forward deployed: embedded with a customer's engineering team, getting our products working inside their environment and watching real engineers use what you built.

Our customers run monorepos with thousands of engineers, custom CI, decade-old build systems and merge processes nobody fully understands. Making Aviator work there isn't a config file—it's engineering. And it's the fastest feedback loop we have. The point of the split isn't to hand you two jobs; it's that the same person who sees the problem in the field gets to fix it in the product on Monday.

An ideal candidate has a unique mix of software expertise, system design, and proficiency in HCI—plus the willingness to sit in a customer's office and debug their build system.

What you will do

Building (most of your time)

• 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 the user landscape.
• Take ownership and drive initiatives for segments within the product.

Forward deployed (about a week or two a month)

• Embed with enterprise customers to deploy, integrate and debug Aviator in their environment—SaaS, on-prem and Kubernetes, GitHub and GitLab, monorepos and custom CI.
• Work directly with their platform, infra and DevEx teams to understand their workflows better than they've articulated them.
• Build the integrations, adapters and scripts that unblock a rollout—then bring the ones that generalize back into the product.
• Turn what you see in the field into roadmap input, with evidence. Ensure customer needs are supported by the broader engineering team through effective prioritization.

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Shipped full-stack products before—whether in your day job or projects outside of work.
• Experience working in low-structure environments, comfortable working with unknowns.
• Passion for building engineering tools, excited about solving problems for engineers.
• Strong communication skills. You can explain a subtle failure mode to a staff engineer and its business impact to a VP in the same meeting.
• Genuine interest in the customer-facing half of this. You don't have to have done it before, but you should want to—being in the room energizes you rather than draining you.
• Willingness to travel occasionally to customer sites.
• Previous experience building internal engineering tools, or working inside a large monorepo, is a plus.

Why you should join us

• Have an impact from day 1. You will be working very closely with the founders every day.
• Enterprise customers who actively engage on product direction—and you'll be in the room with them, not reading a summary of the call.
• Solve your own problems. As an engineer, you get to fix the workflows that frustrated you at your last job.
• 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

Interview Process

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.