Founding Software Engineer

San Francisco, CA, United States

✍???? About daydream

daydream is a platform that automates programmatic SEO, end-to-end.

The platform helps businesses identify search patterns, creates content at scale, and automatically improves that content.

We've raised >$2M from leading investors like Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, SOMA Capital and current and former Heads of Growth/Product Growth at companies like Notion, Airtable, Webflow and Dropbox. We're on a high-growth trajectory and we're looking for people who want to join us on the journey to building a billion-dollar company.

Our team previously worked together at Flixed, a startup we bootstrapped to $2M+ in revenue almost purely on the back of programmatic SEO.

???? The Problem we’re trying to solve

Heads of Growth love programmatic SEO. It’s the secret growth playbook used by companies like Zapier, Canva, to acquire millions of visitors. The problem is, building a pSEO engine currently requires work from SEO analysts, content marketers, software engineers, data scientists and others. As a result, it’s logistically complicated and expensive. You can hire specialized agencies, but they cost $50K+ per month.

???????? How we’re solving this problem

daydream is building a SaaS platform that automates every piece of building a programmatic SEO engine. Everything from identifying search queries, to producing 90th percentile quality content at scale, all the way to automatically updating that content.

???? Why we’re hiring

Demand for daydream is growing fast as our ARR has already doubled since the inception of our company, all before launching a generally available product. This is exciting, but it also means we need to hire to build product faster and meet the demand. We’re looking for senior engineers that are excited to work with LLMs to serve one of the biggest markets in the world.

???????? The People and Environment

Here Are Three Key Elements Of Our Culture

Push the pace

No sandbagging allowed! Everyone at daydream is expected to proactively identify when a particular goal can be met faster, and to push for acceleration.

A real example of how this value has been applied — we initially thought we would hit a certain revenue milestone within 1 year. We realized we can do it in half the time, so we shortened our timeline to hit that goal to 5 months instead.

Build something you’re proud of

Speed of execution is important, but only if it’s in service of delivering a delightful experience to the customer. We want you to look back at what you’ve built at daydream and feel a deep sense of satisfaction.

A real example of how this value has been applied — In the past, we’ve prioritized “wowing” the customer at each release of daydream, even at the earliest phases. Speed is no excuse for delivering a poor experience.

Five star customer service only

The bar for customer service at daydream is always exceeding the customer’s expectations. It is not “meeting” the customer’s expectations.

A real example of how this value has been applied — We’ve had situations where the customer is unintentionally moving slower than is possible with their SEO strategy. In these situations, we’ve proactively encouraged the customer to move faster.

???? The people you’ll be working with

Thenuka (CEO): Thenuka was previously the founder at CEO at Flixed, which he bootstrapped to $2M+ in revenue almost exclusively using programmatic SEO. Prior to that he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Hustle Fund and Chief of Staff to the COO at Pango, a cybersecurity company with $100M+ in annual revenue.

Shravan (Founding Engineer): Shravan was previously an Engineering Lead at Flixed. Before that, Shravan worked as a Software Engineer at Facebook for three years, where he worked on mass-scale web scraping for Facebooks’ Jobs product, and Meta Reality Labs.

Ashok (Founding Engineer) Ashok was previously the Engineering Lead at Flixed. Ashok also co-founded Doji, a startup that gamified options trading ($4M raised from Golden Ventures and others), was employee #1 and Founding Engineer at Umano (acq. Dropbox), and a senior engineer at Social Capital, Google, and Dropbox.

Kelsey (Marketing Lead): Kelsey previously led marketing at Flixed, and before that, content and SEO at MarketerHire. She has also worked as a freelance writer and content strategist for clients like Discovery.

⚙️ Our Stack

C# (.NET 7/8)

Typescript (T3 based)

Next.JS

Postgres

LLMs (GPT)

????????♀️ What You’ll Be Doing Here

Ownership Areas

Building the daydream web app: As our engineering team is only a few people, we’ll look to you to architect the daydream app frontend and backend, taking into account considerations like performance, maintainability, security, scalability.

App Quality and UX: You’ll be responsible for maintaining a high quality bar for the app. Work closely with our designer throughout the engineering cycle to ensure the app is intuitive for users to work with. We want to move fast, but not at the cost of quality.

Working with customers: An important part of this role is to engage with customers, gather feedback and understand their specific needs. You’ll need to translate this feedback into actionable technical requirements and improvements, ensuring that the app continually evolves in alignment with user needs.

1 month

Build context: You’ll get to know Ashok, Thenuka, Kelsey, Shravan and the rest of the team as you work on the daydream app. The frontend uses a T3 inspired React stack and is written in Typescript. You’ll gain and understanding of our app structure and roadmap.

Learn the product: We believe that it’s important for everyone on the team to understand our product well. So, soon after you join, you’ll work with Thenuka to create and deliver content to a real customer. This will help you understand the technology we have and share your ideas!

Commit your first code: You’ll start by building scoped-out features to get your feet wet in our codebase. The first few projects will be frontend-heavy, and gradually ease in to more backend work. Within 1 month you’ll have committed your first few features and bug fixes.

3 months

Research exploratory ideas: As you learnt the ropes, you’ve implemented features that have been scoped out by our team. With the context you’ve gained on the product, help research our more exploratory ideas. Data can help guide decisions, but instinct is important too.

Implement backend changes independently: With the context you’ve gained, build out small-medium backend changes independently. Of course, the team will support you if you need it.

Scope out new ideas for features: We have a long list of features we’d like to build, and we’re sure you’ll bring more. Work with the team to identify the most impactful projects to work on, then execute on them side-by-side with our designer!

6-9 months

Support new hires: As a fast growing company, we will likely expand our team further in 6-9 months. You’ll help onboard new hires to our codebase and support them while they ramp up.

???? Compensation

The compensation for this role is $150K - $200K base salary + 1.5% to 3% equity in daydream.

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