The problem

There's a lot of noise with AI headlines every week, but we help engineering leaders cut through the snake oil and false promises to real use cases that can help their teams today.

Engineering teams still use their human engineering hours to take care of codebase chores, tech debt, and compliance tasks.

This is valuable time and effort that most leaders would rather point to features and bug-fixing.

The solution

Upshift is a coding workspace designed to help engineering teams adopt AI asynchronously. It can spawn and coordinate coding agents to work on outcomes and projects without needing a human to start a prompt.

Our customers use us to handle dependency upgrades and security patches, take care of codebase chores, and manage tech debt campaigns.

The vision

You should consider joining us at Upshift if you are motivated by defining what software engineering will look like in a few years with AI.

Imagine a world where any builder can leave the chore-work to Upshift so they can focus on what makes their projects unique and exciting.

The culture

Upshift is a remote, highly autonomous environment. Each person is here with an understanding that they are the author of their chapter at Upshift.

We anchor ourselves in how we are actually helping our customers. We consider it a privilege to have companies to support and do our best to be a reliable partner who shows up even when the problems feel impossible.

Upshift is a place for people who care about their work and care about other things too. We're not looking for one-dimensional personalities or work drones. Show up, put in the effort when you're working, and then feel comfortable turning off.

At Upshift, we believe engineering teams will be automating grunt work and chores with AI in the coming years. We’re working on a platform to make that possible. Our customers use us to handle things like dependency upgrades and tech debt campaigns.

Our team is small (1 founder + 2 eng contractors). Adam (founder) is an ex-Palantir engineering lead. We are remote-first. We want every person who joins us to take pride in being at Upshift: the caliber of the team, the impact we have on our customers, and the quality of the product.

Upshift is pre-PMF with several early customers, so our next year is most oriented around making something our customers really want. We’ve raised from investors like Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Transpose, and many participating angels.

Why you should work here

• High trust and autonomy: You’ll have ownership over meaningful projects from day one, with the freedom to shape technical decisions and influence product direction. We trust engineers to figure out the best path forward.
• Live in the future: You help us define what software engineering will become in the next decade. Space to imagine, experiment, and explore is baked in to how we operate.
• Deliver real AI value: If you’re tired of AI over-hype and false promises, you’re one of us. Help Upshift cut through the noise for our customers.
• Culture beats strategy: Upshift is a place for people who care about their work and care about other things too. We're not looking for one-dimensional personalities or work drones. Show up, put in the effort when you're working, and then feel comfortable turning off.

What you’ll do

Our north star right now is finding product-market fit. That means making something people want. We need your help for things like:

• Building customer features: our product consists of use case-driven bots to focus on things like test coverage, integrations with tools like Github, and platform features to help human engineers understand how Upshift is contributing. You’ll oversee the architecture, design, deployment, and customer adoption of these features.
• Forward-deployed customer delivery: we’ll never stop talking with our customers to understand how things are going, how we can help, etc. You’ll take customer-facing meetings to understand their problems and turn it into direction for how we should make our product better.
• Keeping culture our secret sauce: our culture is what unifies our direction when strategy needs to evolve and adapt. By being a founding employee, you will be a key player in how we define ourselves at the start.

What we’re looking for

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent
• 3+ years of software engineering experience
• Strong communicator and autonomous operator; comfortable solving technical problems with customers
• TypeScript + React proficient
• (bonus) Effect proficient
• (bonus) AI proficient (prompting skills, evals, guardrails, etc.)

Stand out with a link to a project and video of you explaining what it is, the problem it solves, who it’s for, and how it works

Benefits

• Competitive base salary for early-stage opportunity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited vacation
• Team off-sites

About the interview

• 1 technical screen
• 2 interviews: a behavioral interview and an additional technical interview

We work on all kinds of interesting technical problems, things like:

• low-trust worker sandboxes
• reliable agentic AI workflows for programming tasks
• data and information visualization of complex technical efforts

Our software stack is TypeScript, React, Effect, Postgres, and Fly.io Our AI stack is Upshift (yes we use ourselves!), AI SDK, Claude Code, Cursor