Founding Engineer

About the role

tl;dr: full-stack web development (first hire) at seed-stage LLM startup building workflow automation tools

Compensation:

• Salary/y: JPY 6.5M-8.0M
• Equity: 0.2%-2.0%

What we’re looking for:

• Full-stack web developer, ideally w/ over 3 years of experience building complex systems quickly.
• Having a higher education degree (i.e., bachelor's, master's, Ph.D.) in computer science or a corresponding capability
• Note: we're also open to exceptional college grads with some industry experience (e.g., internship).
• Self-motivated, high ownership, low ego; a desire to work on a fast-paced, intense, fun team.
• Excited to be our first hire; passion for building a world-class engineering culture in Japan.
• Pumped to work in person with us in Tokyo 5 days/week

Stack:

• Backend: FastAPI, Flask, Django
• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vue
• Infra: Redis, Postgres, AWS, Azure

Benefits:

• Relocation assistance: Financial support and guidance for relocating to Tokyo if required.
• Workspace: up to JPY150k you can spend on items like chairs, desks, monitors, etc.
• Social events: regular team-building events, outings, and activities to foster a strong company culture.
• Cultural immersion: an opportunity to immerse yourself in Japanese culture, with access to language sessions, cultural events, and local experiences to enrich your personal and professional journey in Japan.

About the interview

Phone Screen (10-30min.):

• Virtual Meeting
• This is an informal chat for you to learn more about the role.
• We'll ask for details on past projects. We want to know that you can code and speak about your work clearly.
• You’re welcome to ask many questions about whether working at Carnot makes sense.

Tech Screen (40-60min.):

• Virtual Meeting
• You'll meet with our lead dev. He’ll ask you 1-2 coding questions (algorithm design) in your language of preference. We’ll test how you write, test, and debug solutions and identify tradeoffs.

Interview (1hr x 1 person):

• In-person meeting (if possible)
• You'll be interviewed by the founder and our lead dev. This will be a deeper dive into your technical abilities and overall fit. Each interview is 1hr, 45min for our questions, and 15min for yours.
• For the technical portion:
  • Systems Design: you'll be asked questions to identify trade-offs when building systems that collect, store, and present data.
  • Coding Exercise: you'll be asked how you write, test, and debug solutions and identify tradeoffs.
• For the “fit” portion:
  • We look for examples of ownership and autonomy but also dig deeper into communication (i.e., how you communicate your approach, solutions, and overall thinking).

About Carnot

About our product:

We're creating a novel automation tool called Promptflow that makes it easy to build automatic workflows using advanced AI technology such as large language models (LLMs). Traditional automation tools can be expensive and hard to use, but Promptflow lets you automate tasks with simple English instructions. This allows for more flexible and advanced automation than before. Our goal is to help people work more efficiently with smart task automation. Join us in making this big change!

What stands out:

The founder, Shoya Matsumori, possesses a strong background in machine learning and deep learning, with a specific focus on generative AI in the areas of vision and language. Having earned a Ph.D. degree in the field, Matsumori has demonstrated his expertise through participation in tier-1 international conferences, such as the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).