The Compliance Layer Nobody Sees
dili closed a $15 million Series A in August 2026, led by Khosla Ventures with Y Combinator, Brick & Mortar Ventures, and Allianz participating. Six months earlier, the company had 15 people on the Y Combinator jobs board. Today it lists 59 on BuiltIn, and its platform supports over 700 energy and infrastructure projects, Dili's careers page's data shows, that have collectively secured more than $1 billion in federal funding, Dili's careers page reported.
That trajectory — 500 percent headcount growth in half a year, a product that automates prevailing-wage and apprenticeship compliance for datacenters, transmission lines, and advanced manufacturing — sets the hiring bar. dili is a small frontier-tech company that hires across a balanced mix of engineering, product, quality, and business roles, and it holds a high bar for every one of them. There is no junior ladder, no rotational program, no sales academy. At 15 people automating compliance for billion-dollar federal projects, there was no margin for on-the-job learning on the core domain. The bar isn't "smart and adaptable." It's "has already done the adjacent work."
Founded in 2023 as part of Y Combinator's S23 batch, the company operates from New York City. Its founders, Anand Chaturvedi (CEO) and Brian Fernandez (CTO), came from the intersection of financial-compliance automation and construction-industry operations, including former Department of Labor enforcement experience. The product ingests certified payroll, fringe-benefit statements, and apprenticeship records, then maps them to the wage-determination regimes that unlock federal dollars. A prevailing-wage violation on a datacenter build. An apprenticeship ratio missed on a transmission line. Federal funding gets clawed back, the project stalls, and the contractor eats the loss. dili exists to prevent that, and the team it's building reflects the specific difficulty of automating rules written for paper ledgers.
Engineering: Seniority Is the Floor
Engineering roles demand seniority. The Senior Full-Stack Engineer posting asks for six-plus years; the DevOps Engineer and Senior QA Engineer roles both specify six-plus years as well. These aren't mentorship positions: the stack touches regulated payroll data, multi-jurisdiction wage determinations, and audit-ready reporting. The QA role in particular signals the quality bar: compliance software fails loudly when it fails, and the test surface spans federal, state, and local rule sets that change on independent calendars.
Product and Design: The Translation Layer
Product and design sit at the translation layer. The Product Manager role requires three-plus years, but the real filter is whether a candidate has shipped workflows where the user is a compliance officer who will lose their job if the software hallucinates a fringe rate. Design isn't listed as a standalone opening on the careers page, but the company's own description of hiring "across software engineering, product, design, data science" suggests the function exists, likely embedded in product or engineering given the team size.
Customer Success: Regulatory Operations
Customer success carries a domain-specific title: Compliance Customer Success Manager. Three-plus years required, but the "Compliance" prefix isn't decorative. The role owns the customer's audit outcome. When a DOL investigator asks for the certified-payroll packet, this person ensures the platform produces it in the exact format the agency expects. That's not account management — it's regulatory operations.
Sales and Marketing: Specialized from Day One
Sales and marketing are similarly specialized. The Founding Business Development Representative role asks for just one-plus year, but it's labeled "founding" for a reason: the first BDRs will define the outbound motion for a buyer — general contractors, developers, public-agency prime contractors — who doesn't wake up thinking about software. The Demand Gen Marketer role spans a wide band, three-plus years, $95K–$225K, Y Combinator's jobs board shows, reflecting the need for someone who can build pipeline in a category that barely has keywords. Sales Operations Manager (five-plus years) rounds out the go-to-market side, owning the machinery behind a sales cycle that involves prevailing-wage consultants, surety brokers, and federal program officers.
Operations: The Missing Posting
Operations appears in the company's own hiring summary but hasn't surfaced as a discrete posting in the current board data. Given the regulatory surface area, the first ops hire will likely sit closer to legal and compliance than to traditional people-ops.
What It Pays
dili's posted salary bands span roughly $83,000 to $225,000 per year across seven active roles, with a median midpoint near $190,000. The company lists base salaries only; equity mechanics are not disclosed in any public posting or first-party source reviewed for this guide.
| Role | Location | Salary Band (USD/year) |
|---|---|---|
| Demand Gen Marketer | New York City, NY / Remote (US) | $95,000 – $225,000 |
| DevOps Engineer | New York, NY, US | $180,000 – $220,000 |
| Senior Full-Stack Engineer | New York, NY, US / Remote (US) | $125,000 – $200,000 |
| Senior QA Engineer | New York, NY, US | $160,000 – $190,000 |
| Product Manager | New York, NY, US | $160,000 – $190,000 |
| Compliance Customer Success Manager | New York, NY, US / Remote (US) | $100,000 – $130,000 |
The bands reflect a team still early in its scaling curve. Wide ranges are typical for Series A companies calibrating for both near-term contributors and the leads they'll need as the product org doubles again. Engineering roles sit at the top. DevOps Engineer posts the highest floor at $180,000, a signal that infrastructure reliability is a current bottleneck. Senior QA Engineer and Product Manager share an identical $160,000–$190,000 band, placing product and quality on equal footing, consistent with a compliance platform where a missed wage determination triggers the same penalty as a software bug. The Compliance Customer Success Manager band ($100,000–$130,000) is the narrowest, reflecting a more defined scope: onboarding contractors, running look-back assessments, and managing the weekly five-minute payroll review loop the platform automates.
All listed roles are based in New York with US-remote eligibility noted for four of the six. No geographic differentials appear in the postings. The company has not published an equity framework, refresh policy, or strike-price methodology in any careers material, LinkedIn update, or board listing. Candidates should ask directly about option grants, vesting schedules, and whether the Series A valuation ($15M on an undisclosed post-money) sets the current 409A.
The compensation picture is coherent with the company's stated model: high-leverage software replacing hours of manual compliance work, sold to Fortune 500 EPCs and developers who measure ROI in protected tax credits. The median $190,000 midpoint aligns with New York-market senior IC cash comp, while the upper ends of the engineering bands reach into staff-level territory — a hedge for a team that expects to promote from within as the 700-project portfolio expands toward the 3x pipeline growth the World Resources Institute projects for 2026–2027.
How the Hiring Process Works
dili's public postings on Y Combinator and its own careers page list roles in New York and remote across the U.S. and Canada: software engineering, DevOps, QA, product, sales, customer success, and demand generation. The company does not publish a step-by-step interview playbook. No first-party source documents dili's specific interview stages, evaluation rubrics, or timeline. What follows is the only grounded statement possible: the roles are senior-heavy, the domain is regulated compliance automation, and the salary bands reflect those levels. Candidates should expect the process to test whether they can operate at that level in this domain.
Where the Work Happens
dili operates from a single physical hub in New York City, with a deliberate remote-access layer that covers the continental United States. The first-party board data shows six active postings: every one lists "New York, NY, US" as the primary location, and four of the six explicitly add "Remote (US)" as an alternative. That split is not accidental. The roles that carry the remote tag (Demand Gen Marketer, Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Compliance Customer Success Manager) are outward-facing or delivery-oriented; the roles that don't (DevOps Engineer, Senior QA Engineer, Product Manager) sit closer to the infrastructure and product core that the company keeps on-site.
The New York office functions as the coordination center for a senior-heavy workforce, with the DevOps band topping out at $220k, Zero G Talent's board data found, and the Senior Full-Stack band at $200k; a senior-heavy workforce tends to gravitate toward a physical base where architecture decisions, security reviews, and release coordination happen in real time. The QA and DevOps postings' absence of a remote option reinforces that reading: test infrastructure and deployment pipelines are easier to harden when the people who own them share a rack, a network, and a whiteboard.
Remote (US) is not a blanket policy. It appears role-by-role, which suggests the company evaluates each function's collaboration density before opening it to distributed work. A Demand Gen Marketer running campaigns and measuring funnel metrics can operate from anywhere with a reliable connection; a Senior QA Engineer validating hardware-adjacent flows or a DevOps Engineer managing on-premises CI/CD runners may need physical proximity to the lab or the rack. The Product Manager role, often the highest-bandwidth communication node in a product org, also stays in New York, signaling that dili treats product leadership as a presence job.
The board data doesn't reveal whether the New York site is a leased office, a co-working anchor, or a founder's loft. What it does show is a company that has chosen not to fragment across multiple metros. No San Francisco posting, no Austin, no London. That concentration keeps the headcount legible (seven roles, one time zone, one legal entity) and it aligns with that balance the guide's theme describes. A distributed company at this scale would need a layer of management dili hasn't posted for.
For candidates, the implication is straightforward: if you're in the New York orbit, you have access to the full menu. If you're elsewhere in the U.S., you're eligible for a subset: currently engineering (Senior Full-Stack), marketing (Demand Gen), and customer success (Compliance CSM). The remote tag is a signal of which functions the company has already proven can ship without daily colocation. It is not a promise that every future role will carry it.
Who Thrives Here
The company's own job postings and public positioning reveal a consistent pattern: dili hires people who can operate at the intersection of regulated-industry complexity and modern software velocity. Every open role, spanning DevOps, full-stack engineering, QA, product, compliance customer success, and demand generation, sits inside a product described as "the AI-powered operating system for compliance automation, built for regulated industries." That framing dictates the daily work. Engineers ship code that financial institutions, healthcare providers, and other regulated entities rely on for audit-grade accuracy. Product managers translate evolving regulatory requirements into roadmap priorities without slowing release cadence. QA engineers design test strategies that satisfy both CI/CD pipelines and examiner expectations. The compliance customer success manager role exists because implementation is not a handoff — it is a continuing partnership with clients who face real regulatory consequences if the software misbehaves.
The salary bands on the Zero G Talent board reinforce the seniority bar. The six salaried roles posted range from $95,000 for a demand generation marketer to $220,000 for a DevOps engineer, with a board-wide median of $190,000. These figures cluster around those levels, not junior apprenticeships. The company lists seven salaried roles total on the board, suggesting a lean team where each hire must carry significant scope immediately.
Glassdoor shows four reviews for "Dili Development Company" — a name close enough to warrant attention but not confirmed as the same entity. The review count is too small to extract reliable cultural signals. What the board data does show is a distributed model: New York City headquarters with that remote eligibility. That structure selects for people who communicate asynchronously by default, document decisions rigorously, and treat time-zone overlap as a constraint to design around rather than a perk to exploit.
The Y Combinator listing confirms the startup trajectory: early-stage, venture-backed, scaling headcount deliberately. The research does not contain employee testimonials, internal value statements, or founder interviews that would let this section quote the company's own words directly. What it does contain is a consistent structural signal: a small, well-capitalized team building horizontal infrastructure for vertical compliance problems, hiring almost exclusively at senior levels, distributed across North America. The compliance layer nobody sees.
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