Who we are
Caro is a headcount platform for enterprise teams founded by Roopak and Cathy. For software companies, headcount is 70%+ of spend, and the team is the lifeblood of the company. Yet, it’s notoriously difficult to get right. Caro helps companies hire quickly without overspending by getting finance teams, people teams, talent teams, and hiring leaders on the same page.
Quick highlights:
Our early customers are leading tech companies: Affirm, Discord, OpenAI, and more.
We’re backed by tier 1 investors: Accel and Lightspeed.
We’re nearly profitable and have 3+ years of runway.
What we’re building
Here are some technical challenges we’ve been tackling recently:
Multi-system reconciliation: Caro has bi-directional integrations into 3 core systems (finance, recruiting, and HR). Reconciling values between all three and resolving discrepancies is extremely challenging. Think of it like a complicated CRDT with slow moving systems.
Permissions: Since we manage sensitive data (e.g., compensation, termination), we need to a robust permissions management system to ensure only certain people can access this information. Think of a spreadsheet with cell level permissions for reading and writing.
Agentic workflows: We are deploying agents to execute tasks along the headcount lifecycle (e.g., mapping and validating data across systems, making changes to records). We’re building a framework to orchestrate these tasks, while keeping a human in the loop.
What we're looking for
We’re looking for a Founding Engineer to work directly with our founders and early customers to build our early product and join us in our journey toward product market fit. You’ll own large parts of the product independently, from technical design all the way to shipping into production. But in true startup fashion, you’ll be wearing way more hats than just engineering (implementation, product, customer support). You will:
Ship and iterate quickly while being thoughtful about trade offs for quality
Collaborate with the founders on designing the best solution for our customers’ problems
“Color outside the lines” and challenge the status quo by bringing fresh perspectives
Interact directly with customers to diagnose and resolve issues in the product
Work in a variety of languages and technologies, including GCP, MongoDB, and Typescript
Who you are
2+ years experience in a full time software engineering role
Motivated by delivering tangible impact to customers - you like to see your product in the hands of customers
Track record of learning and curiosity - you’re always tinkering on side projects and may get bored of doing the same thing for a long time
High bar for excellence - you build products that you’d be proud to show your friends and family
Collaborative, but independent - you enjoy brainstorming with teammates but are also self sufficient and can handle ambiguity / lack of structure
Open to working with us in-person in Palo Alto, CA
Bonus points if you can split the tie between coffee ☕ and matcha 🍵!
Our interview process
We have a 4-stage interview process that typically takes 2-3 weeks from start to finish.
Intro with founders (30 min)
Technical deep dive (30 min) - We’ll dive into a project you’ve worked on in the past and unpack how you brought it to life: what you built, the key decisions you made, and the tradeoffs you considered along the way. From there, we’ll explore how you think about building a product from the ground up, including how you approach things like data modeling, infrastructure choices, and overall system design.
Onsite interview (virtual or in person, ~4 hours)
Caro product demo (15 min) - We’ll walk you through our product, so that you can see firsthand what we’re building.
System design (45 min) - We’ll explore how you approach designing systems. Expect to talk through a real-world problem, discuss tradeoffs, and share how you think about data modeling, scalability, reliability, and clean architecture.
Coding (45 minutes) - This is a hands-on session focused on problem solving. You’ll build a small version of what you designed in the system design interview. We avoid LeetCode style questions and want to see how you build systems. You’re very welcome to use Claude or Cursor or any other AI coding tools that you’re comfortable with. Our goal is to understand your logic.
Engineering practical (45 minutes) - This is a hands-on session where you'll dive into an existing codebase to debug an issue or add a new feature. There are no algorithmic puzzles here; we want to see how you navigate real-world code, make trade-offs, and solve practical everyday problems.
Product brainstorm (30 min) - This is a conversational session about how you understand user problems, brainstorm solutions, and collect feedback and iterate. Expect to talk through a few examples from products you’ve worked on or products that you love to use.
Reference checks and offer 🎉
How to apply
Does this role sound like a good fit? Email us at founders@carohq.com with your resume and/or your LinkedIn profile. We’re looking forward to meeting you!