Founding Platform / Full-Stack / Front-end Engineer

About Us

Poly is building a better file storage platform for everyone. We're backed by YC, Bloomberg Beta, Felicis, Figma Ventures, AI Grant, and more, and we're looking to grow our founding team of superstar builders and dreamers.

Our file storage platform will "replace Finder and File Explorer" as the de-facto user experience for managing your personal files (we will host them as well). We know, it's an insanely ambitious goal, but we think it's not only possible but necessary to finally do away with these legacy file systems.

Concretely, here's three reasons why people need Poly:

1. Find anything using natural language and multi-modal queries ("images in the style of X from last week"), so that you never lose track of your stuff again.
2. Auto-upload/sync content from your GenAI apps via auth or browser plugin, complete with metadata.
3. Create projects and workspaces where you can pin files, save folders that dynamically update, and mention notes/links for reference. Spend less time managing files and more time getting stuff done.

About You

We are looking for a founding platform developer to join us in building Poly's desktop and web applications. You will need to wear many hats, but the only hat you'll never remove is your attention to detail and dedication towards excellence. You must have significant experience (or significant enthusiasm) in building cross platform full-stack experiences. Specifically, we would pay attention to your expertise in the following:

• Core software design and architectural considerations in developing a full-stack application for file management, including reactivity (e.g. React, Vue), persistence, latency, data caching, interaction, and API
• Extensive knowledge of client-server communication strategies including HTTP, websockets, binary formats such as protobufs/cbor, etc.
• Cross-platform considerations using Electron/Tauri or some other packaging framework that suits our needs
• WASM and other optimizations over raw JS that allow us to perform hyper-fast data management
• Debugging and test practices that let us catch both unit, integration, and interaction bugs.
• Modern web standards across domains, such as WebGPU, WebGL, WebAudio, WebRTC, File Storage/File Access.

Send a friend request on LinkedIn with a short blurb (in the connection request) to me, and I will be 1000+% more likely to see and respond to your interest. My bio is here: http://linkedin.com/in/abhaykagarwal/

Our entire interview process is extensively documented here. The interview process is going to look roughly like the following:

1. An introductory call with a founding team member.
2. You will talk to another team member, who will want to know more about your background, prior projects, and hard/interesting problems that you have worked on. We'll likely be basically grilling you on specifics, and this interview might come off as "insistent", or "demanding". This is only because we are essentially trying to dig in deep enough to where we're satisfied that you are deeply aware of the technical trade-offs of a given system.
3. We'll have you do a take-home project or exercise (most of you will come here because of that). You'll have essentially unlimited time to work on this, but the longer that you work on it, the higher the standard becomes. On the other hand, working more on this also shows higher passion and conviction. Overall, we are extremely comfortable with both the "ninja that did this in less than an hour" types, but also the more methodical types. So even if you're in a hurry, give it a shot!
4. We will do a team-wide set of interviews where you will be speaking with everyone on the team. As long as we are small, we will operate on a consensus basis for hires, so we all want to be highly excited to hire you. Please see the "Team Interview" section for more information on how to prepare for this.
5. If we are all very high conviction in your capabilities after all those conversations, the last thing we will do is pay you to fly out to meet us, and work with us for a while (at least a day, less than a week at most). You have agency in this, in terms of when you can come, how long you can stay, and what you want to work on while you're here. We ue you have fun!
6. Finally, we'll make you an offer and/or discuss logistics. In most cases, we'll have already discusses some of the specifics already, so this won't be full of bad surprises.