Ema | Software Engineer | Vancouver, BC | Hybrid (3 days/wk) | Full-time
Ema is building the Universal AI Employee — AI that handles repetitive enterprise tasks so people can focus on creative, high-impact work. Founded by ex-Google and Coinbase execs. $75M raised from Accel, Section 32, Prosus, KPMG, and others.
We're hiring software engineers to build the core platform: APIs, backend systems, data infrastructure, and front-end interfaces.
You'd be a great fit if you care about clean, test-driven code, have experience with enterprise integrations and auth, and thrive in a fast-moving startup where scope is broad and ambiguity is the norm.
Comp includes salary + equity + benefits, scaled to experience and level.
Love the product and you've nailed the simple design!
I'm concerned about email deliverability--Even more so after the email verification ended up in my spam. Handling incoming email is simple enough, but for this to be useful to my team we would want to be confident that the emails are ending up in the right place.
The article doesn't dive into why this group performed worse; to me that is of much more interest than the conclusion.
Just from my own observations I would expect that this is largely due to income differences in the two groups. Rich people are more likely to own iPhones and in my experience also more likely to be careless drivers.
Hootsuite also started as an agency side project, and I'm sure there are more.
Intentionally following this model doesn't seem sensible though; with VC money so accessible if you have already put together a good team you might as well focus on the product itself. Agency work is not fun.
Speaking as a former AWS Engineer, I disagree with the sentiment that they are able to glue AWS services together better than what a competing non-AWS company can do. Internally the use of AWS is subject to the same constraints and APIs you and I have.
Their competitive advantage is their captive customer base, which will much rather pay a premium to use an AWS-managed service than use another vendor.
I've seen this done for new projects, and it works really well. If your data access patterns are truly relational (varied lookup paths) then it is probably not the right tool, but many apps can be modeled in a way that DDB handles well.
Having been in your position, I understand that having built a product from the ground up makes you feel like you are qualified to do anything. I was lucky enough to get hired at a late-stage startup after my endeavor failed, and am constantly reminded that time in the industry matters. Two years of intense coding is worth a lot, but you've only been exposed to a limited set of problems, both technical and business. 6+ years sounds reasonable to me if they are looking for someone with well-rounded experience.
Mind you, as someone else mentioned, some folks spend 6 years in the industry and don't gain the knowledge and experience you already have, but that doesn't mean you've attained 6 years worth of knowledge and experience.
I've recently joined a team writing primarily in Clojure, whose proponents often tout repl-driven programming as a unique benefit to the language.
In a statically typed language (the stronger the better), aided by a good IDE, I don't need to be constantly executing my code against data during development; My editor is constantly validating my code, and when it stops complaining, my code will work. And months later when I or someone else uses that code in another part of the system, they won't need to execute that code to see how it behaves, as the types themselves provide documentation and as-you-code feedback.
Ema is building the Universal AI Employee — AI that handles repetitive enterprise tasks so people can focus on creative, high-impact work. Founded by ex-Google and Coinbase execs. $75M raised from Accel, Section 32, Prosus, KPMG, and others.
We're hiring software engineers to build the core platform: APIs, backend systems, data infrastructure, and front-end interfaces.
Stack: Go, Python, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch. Multi-tenant SaaS.
You'd be a great fit if you care about clean, test-driven code, have experience with enterprise integrations and auth, and thrive in a fast-moving startup where scope is broad and ambiguity is the norm.
Comp includes salary + equity + benefits, scaled to experience and level.
https://www.ema.ai/careers