Aviator is a San Francisco-based developer productivity platform founded in 2021 to automate software engineering workflows. Emerging from Y Combinator's S21 batch, the seed-stage company operates with a six-person team and powers developer operations at engineering organizations including Slack, Figma, and DoorDash. Its core products automate code integration and reviews: MergeQueue prevents merge conflicts and broken builds, FlexReview routes pull requests to reviewers, Runbooks enables collaborative workflow automation using natural language AI agents, and Verify serves as an AI code verification engine.
Architecture and Infrastructure
To support engineering teams scaling from 20 to over 2,000 developers, Aviator offers cloud, self-hosted, and single-tenant deployment models. In a case study published by Google Cloud, founder Ankit Jain detailed how the platform relies on Google Kubernetes Engine to scale pods dynamically across active user sessions. The infrastructure incorporates Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL database operations, query tagging with Sqlcommenter to detect slow database calls, Memorystore for Redis to enforce API rate limits, and Managed Service for Prometheus alongside Cloud Monitoring for system observability.
Leadership and Code Verification Philosophy
Aviator was founded by Ankit Jain and Spriha Tucker. Ankit Jain previously worked as a software engineer at Google and Adobe, led platform engineering at Homejoy, and served as an engineering lead at Sunshine and Shippo. He also spent time as an entrepreneur in residence at Unshackled Ventures and leads Xoogler.co, a network of former Google employees.
In a presentation at AI Engineer, Jain outlined why line-by-line code reviews face bottlenecks under AI-assisted development. With code churn increasing and over 30% of pull requests merging without human review, Aviator advocates replacing manual diff checks with behavioral verification. "Code review is not just about code review, it is about getting the alignment," Jain explained. The company's framework captures developer intent and prompt sessions to establish acceptance criteria, compiling recurring review feedback into an automated registry to enforce code guardrails.
Expanding on these concepts on the Decoding Leadership podcast, Jain compared modern software production to post-industrial manufacturing, where developers shift from hand-crafting code to building automated harnesses and machines that generate software. On Aviator's podcast Engineering X, Jain discussed engineering confidence with industry leaders, noting how AI coding tools can create false confidence when organizations evaluate delivery metrics without clear verification data.
Team Growth and Open Roles
To expand its engineering platform, Aviator is recruiting across product and engineering in San Francisco.
The product organization is hiring a Technical Product Manager, Founding team ($140,000 - $180,000 / year) to own product areas end-to-end, starting with Verify. The position involves prototyping ideas using coding agents and conducting product discovery with platform, infrastructure, and developer experience teams at customer sites.
On the engineering team, Aviator is seeking a Software engineer, Forward Deployed ($130,000 - $170,000 / year). This fullstack role combines shipping products in the codebase alongside the founders in San Francisco with spending roughly one to two weeks per month embedded directly within customer engineering teams to deploy and debug Aviator.
The company is also hiring a Senior Software engineer, Founding team ($160,000 - $200,000 / year) and a Software engineer, Fullstack ($120,000 - $160,000 / year). Both roles guide the product roadmap alongside the founders, build prototypes into finished products, and resolve complex issues for users. Additionally, Aviator offers a Software Engineering Intern ($5,000 - $8,000 / year) role focused on user development needs and collaborative problem solving.
Open Roles at Aviator
| Role | Location | Work Mode | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Product Manager, Founding team | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $140,000 - $180,000 / year |
| Software engineer, Forward Deployed | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $130,000 - $170,000 / year |
| Software Engineering Intern | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $5,000 - $8,000 / year |
| Software engineer, Fullstack | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $120,000 - $160,000 / year |
| Senior Software engineer, Founding team | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $160,000 - $200,000 / year |
