Founding Engineer

Tsenta (YC S26); Bengaluru; On-site; INR 1,500,000 - 2,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Tsenta (YC S26) is hiring the first full-time software engineer to join their Bengaluru onsite team. You will engage directly with users, shape the product roadmap with autonomy, and ship features rapidly from day one.

A strong background in production-grade systems and TypeScript is essential, with a bias for delivering high-quality, scalable software. You will own end-to-end development and collaborate with a lean team to move metrics that matter, while working in an environment that values

Qualifications

• Proven experience shipping production software used by real users.
• Strong TypeScript and backend depth with end-to-end ownership.
• Willingness to talk to users and gather feedback, customer-facing.

Responsibilities

• Talk to users regularly and translate feedback into fixes or features.
• Define your own roadmap and deliver an MVP with clear scope.
• Ship to production in your first week and own a user-visible metric.
• Set high engineering bar for future hires.

Skills

TypeScript

Backend depth

Production software

User communication

Tools

Embeddings

pgvector

Ranking

Job description

TLDR:

Applying to jobs sucks. Reading a job description isn’t much better. If you’re right for this, we should already be talking, not sorting your CV into a pile of four hundred. That’s the thing we’re building Tsenta to kill. Every hiring platform was built for the company doing the hiring. We’re building the first one that works for the candidate

$2.5M ARR in 3 months

70% of our users get an interview, at places like Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Jane Street. Our job is to make that 100%, and you’d be our first full time engineering hire.

What You’ll Do

• Talk to users. Constantly. We spend a large share of every week on calls with people in the middle of a job search, and you will too. This is not a role where someone else gathers feedback and files it. You hear the problem, you ship the fix or the feature, you call the person back.
• Define your own roadmap. You won’t be handed a spec. You’ll use your own product sense to decide what to build, scope it down to an MVP, ship it, and see whether it moved anything.
• Ship to production in your first week and own a user-visible metric within your first month.
• Set the engineering bar for everyone we hire after you.

What We’re Looking For

• You are highly technical: preferred you have prior experience shipping production software by real users as a software engineer at a tech company or startup. But hustlers are always appreciated.
• Strong TypeScript and real backend depth. You don’t need our exact stack. You do need to have owned a production, queue-driven system end to end.
• LLMs past the tutorial stage. Tool use, retrieval, evals, and the failure modes.
• A high bar on output. Speed is the only advantage we have over the companies with 400 engineers. But shipping fast and shipping sloppy are different things, and we want both the speed and the obsession with detail.
• You actually want to talk to users. If the calls sound like a tax, this is the wrong role.
• Based in Bengaluru or willing to relocate. Onsite.

Who Does Well Here

People who genuinely enjoy talking to customers, who iterate and ship quickly, and who bring a strong sense of ownership and autonomy. Low ego, high standards. You’d rather delete code than add an abstraction. Confident nonsense is worse to us than honest ambiguity.

There’s no legacy code here and no layers of approval. You won’t just work here, you’ll help decide what “here” means.

Nice to have

• Search and retrieval: embeddings, pgvector, ranking, recommendations.
• Consumer product instincts. Our users are not engineers, and they’re stressed.