Software Engineer - Marketplace

Skills this role screens for

About the role

ABOUT AFTERQUERY

AfterQuery https://www.afterquery.com/ is an applied research lab curating data solutions for foundation model development. We serve every frontier AI lab with the mission of delivering the best data to power the best models. In doing so, we can make expertise that once took a lifetime to build available to anyone who needs it.

Our customers are the ones building the foundation models themselves and our work sits directly in the loop of how those systems improve. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at a defining moment in AI. Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation. We're based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors including Altos Ventures, BoxGroup, and Y Combinator and angels from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Microsoft AI.

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WHY APPLY

Massive Opportunity: Forbes reported that we could be YC's fastest unicorn, reportedly raising at a $3.2 billion valuation, and we're not slowing down.

Founding Impact: You will own and architect core infrastructure systems that power our platform from the ground up.

Equity & Growth: Competitive salary and meaningful equity. As we scale, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the engineering organization and lead major technical initiatives.

Strong Team: Our founding team has experience from Citadel Securities, Meta, Google, Silver Lake, and Morgan Stanley — work alongside world-class engineers and researchers.

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OVERVIEW

Growth Engineering is where engineering meets the company’s most important commercial and user-facing problems. You will build the product systems that help us find, qualify, activate, and retain exceptional experts — and help the teams serving frontier AI labs move faster with better information and less manual work.

This is a hands-on product engineering role for someone with 3–5 years of experience who wants unusually high ownership. You will work directly with Growth, Operations, Design, and the founders, turning ambiguous opportunities into simple, reliable software that drives measurable outcomes.

The work

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build end-to-end product experiences across expert acquisition, onboarding, assessments, matching, activation, and retention.
• Partner directly with Growth and Operations to identify the highest-leverage bottlenecks, instrument the funnel, and ship improvements quickly.
• Own experiments from idea through implementation and measurement: define the hypothesis, build the product, assess the result, and iterate.
• Develop internal tools and automation that make customer-facing and operational teams dramatically more effective without compromising quality or control.
• Create durable product primitives and clean interfaces rather than one-off workflows; improve existing systems as you touch them.
• Use data, user feedback, and technical judgment to make clear tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

Who they want

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 3–5 of professional software engineering experience, ideally building high-velocity product, growth, marketplace, or workflow software.
• Strong full-stack engineering ability and a track record of shipping user-facing product from ambiguous requirements.
• Excellent product sense: you can distinguish the real problem from the first requested solution and focus on what will move the metric.
• Comfort working closely with non-technical partners and translating their needs into simple, robust systems.
• High ownership, strong judgment, and the ability to move quickly without creating unnecessary complexity.

Nice to have

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with growth engineering, marketplace liquidity, onboarding, conversion optimization, or product analytics.
• Experience at a fast-growing startup or on a lean team where engineers owned both product decisions and execution.
• Interest in AI, data products, or tools that make complex wor