Tsenta
Founding Engineer
Bengaluru, KA, IN / Bengaluru, Karnataka, IN · Not specified
- Annual base salary
- See listed compensation
- Equity
- Not disclosed
- Commitment
- Full Time
- Company stage
- Not disclosed
Compensation as listed
₹7.5M - ₹15M INR
About Tsenta
Tsenta is fast, student-centric, and scrappy. We ship daily, iterate constantly, and never settle for good enough. We're obsessed with building a world-class user experience for everyone on our platform.
How we work
We're a small team where everyone owns what they build. No layers, no approval chains. You pick up a problem, ship a solution, and see it in users' hands by end of week. We move fast because the people we're building for can't afford to wait.
What we care about
We build for students and job seekers who are tired of wasting hours on broken application portals. Every feature we ship comes from real pain we've experienced ourselves. If something isn't working for our users, we fix it that day, not next sprint.
Who does well here
People who like building more than talking about building. People who take ownership and figure things out. People who want to work on something that actually matters to millions of students going through the job search grind right now.
About the role
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.
Tech at Tsenta
TypeScript everywhere. Most job automation tools run in the cloud, which means captchas, detection, latency, and cost. We run everything locally on the user's machine.
Our Stack
- Frontend: React, Tailwind CSS, Redux Toolkit
- Desktop: Electron, Playwright
- Backend: AdonisJS, PostgreSQL
- AI/ML: OpenAI, Deepseek, pgvector
- Infra: Vercel, Fly.io, PostHog
- Dev Tools: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex
Source: Y Combinator. Confirm availability with the employer.
Apply through the original posting.
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