You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.
We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.
We care deeply about helping people connect more deeply with themselves and others. And in the spirit of personal empowerment, we aim to invert the internet's data model over time and put individuals in control of their digital identities.
Shelf helps users passively track their consumption, connect with others through shared interests, and gain insights about themselves from their data. And, in return, users get a personal data store and the ability to provision access to their credentials and data at-will, gaining a passport to a more agentic internet. We've helped >500,000 users re-aggregate >1B data points so far (i.e. Jad watched S2E1 of Severance). Check us out on the iOS app store (Android coming soon!)
Shelf is powered by our platform connections solution: DataMover, a "Plaid for Personal Data”. Beyond Shelf, it’s now used by a select group of 3rd party apps and agents to power novel experiences.
The future is personalized experiences powered by user-controlled data, this depends on dynamic and transportable user data. We’re building a future where apps and services come to you and your data—not the other way around. See our latest paper here.
The Opportunity
We’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful full-stack engineer with a strong product sense, systems-level thinking, and an eye for high-quality user experiences.
While our current frontend is React-based, we welcome candidates from iOS, native mobile, or hybrid full-stack backgrounds who’ve worked deeply on consumer-grade UI/UX, and care about architecture and performance across the stack.
In this role you will:
Collaborate closely with product team — including our CEO, designer and user researcher.
Work directly with our CTO (ex-founder & led product & engineering teams at Improbable)
You’ll ship features reach lots of people faster than you ever have before.
Make key technical decisions across the stack
Build features users will love.
Be responsible for crafting scalable front-end architecture.
Ensure code and product quality.
Implement engineering best practices across development and deployment.
Guide/mentor other engineers (note: this is an IC role; if you're looking for a pure Engineering Manager role, this isn't the best fit)
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Note that Shelf is built on a web stack and streamed into mobile apps via Capacitor. See more here.
We’re early stage, so you'll have an outsized equity stake and an unparalleled opportunity to shape the product direction. Engineers at koodos labs decide what gets built and why, in addition to figuring out how.
We're NY-based (we have our own office in West Soho) and we work in-person.
We’re open to extraordinary candidates globally if they bring something uniquely valuable, especially from strong front-end hubs (e.g., France, UK, remote US).
Our Team
We’re a small, but mighty team with backgrounds at YouTube, Coinbase, Harvard, and Cambridge, as startup founders and as early members at companies like Improbable and Lyft. We’ve come together around a shared vision and are dedicated to creating important and positive experiences for cyberspace.
We're well resourced (unannounced rounds) & backed by top-tier investors, including the backers of companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Snap, and Twitter, as well as the founders of companies like Zynga, VSCO, and Scale and the people behind artists like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Lorde, Logic, and Panic! At The Disco, and many others. Our team is advised by the founders of Pinterest, Dubsmash (now Reddit), as well as pioneers of digital marketing and market design from Harvard.
We care about building a genuinely diverse team. We are a majority-first gen immigrant team and sponsor visas — we think that’s important as we build towards enabling easier digital migration. We share the same values of individuality, empathy, reliability, kindness and humility. One big overlap among our life experiences is contrasts: contrasts between our own upbringing and the world around us, contrasts between what was expected of us and what we ended up pursuing and our bringing together of contrasting, interdisciplinary worlds.
We recognize that a confidence gap might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.
7+ years experience: As a small startup, we’re prioritizing candidates with 7+ years in software engineering. You should have experience setting technical direction for a team of engineers
Our stack includes React, Typescript, Postgres (via Supabase), and Capacitor, but we’re open to anyone with strong full-stack chops and a track record of simplifying complex systems.
You care about systemic product simplification — breaking down complex features, pushing work to the backend when appropriate, and designing interfaces that are fast and delightful.
You’re excited about UX as a system — not just pixels, but flows, data shaping, and real-time feedback.
You’ve worked across a stack — even if you specialize in one layer, you think holistically about how code, infra, data, and UX interact.
Great at collaborating with product: You have experience working closely with product teams, are comfortable with some organized chaos and are capable of picking up some project management-y tasks to make sure that we’re working effectively.
Team: You are an engineer who wants to ship code and contribute to a great engineering team. At koodos labs, we know that early teammates set the culture years into the future. You should be committed to the startup journey, have a perspective on what makes great code and what makes a great team — and you should care deeply about holding both code and teams to a high standard. We are an in-person team in New York and believe that being together IRL is an important part of setting the right pace, level of collaboration and culture early on.
Ownership: You have shipped software for at least five years, and you’re ready to take end-to-end responsibility for a codebase. You know what makes a frictionless user experience, and you’re excited to ship code to production.
Learning: You are comfortable building early-stage products and taking action with imperfect information. The market is changing rapidly, and we need to respond to change without running in circles. You should be comfortable adapting rapidly while remaining focused on a goal.
Individuality: You bring a unique perspective to the team. We want anyone in the world to be able to use our products, so we approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We recognize that bringing together different perspectives and backgrounds helps build stronger teams and products.
Pragmatic: You know when to take on technical debt, descope features, work on architecture, and prioritise enablers. You are able to use your understanding of the business and product to maximise you and the team’s impact and productivity.
Startup Experience: You know that building great companies takes a lot of work. Seed-stage companies can offer some of the most challenging, invigorating, and rewarding experiences in tech — quite simply, koodos labs is different from Big Tech. It helps if you’ve experienced the ups and downs of startup life before, but so long as you’re excited for an adventure, we’re excited to have you join.
Here are some quotes from team members around what they want to see:
“Have strong product chops pls”
“Bonus points if they are excited about video game mechanics, and the idea of creating digital toys.”
“Are deeply committed to high-quality, sustainable, and scalable engineering”
“Can elegantly structure and decomp complex features”
“Are comfortable with ambiguity”
“Generate quick yet thoughtful solutions when faced with constraints”
“Put ego aside when making decisions”
“Practice leading without authority”
What you'll do
Day 1: You’ll merge your first PR. We want our developer experience to be as smooth as possible, so this first day is a good test of how we’re doing on dev ops. The code changes will be very minor — just adding your name to a file and merging it to the main branch.
Day 7: You’ll ship your first feature to production. We believe in learning-by-doing, so we’ll assign you a small feature that lets you run through our full feature planning and development pipeline. We’ll make sure you have support at every step along the way.
Day 30: You’ll assume responsibility for an end-to-end feature and/or part of the codebase. We have an ownership culture, so as soon as you’re familiar with a part of the codebase, we’ll put you in charge of that specific part.
In the Future: You’ll become a senior leader at koodos labs, either as a people manager or an individual contributor. We expect the early team to grow into high-impact roles as the company scales.
How we interview
We aim to move fast — typically two weeks end-to-end. We find this works best for both us and you!
And we focus on real-world experience, demonstrated ability, and references. No riddles or binary tree puzzles — just a thoughtful look at what you’ve done and where you’re headed.
Introduction: We’ll kick things off by sharing a short video about the team and role. It’s a great way to get context and prep questions ahead of our call.
Technical Screening: A conversation with our CTO to dig into your background, goals, and share more about what we’re building at koodos.
Take-Home Exercise: A short video from you walking through your experience with tools and challenges relevant to our work, or perhaps links to your open source contributions.
Cultural Screening: If things are feeling like a fit, we’ll do a second interview — a session with our CEO, this time focused on values and prior team experiences.
Onsite: You’ll meet the team. We spread this across two days to reduce load:
Day 1: System design deep dive
Day 2: Lunch with the team, behavioural interview with our CTO, and a system architecture conversation, and a brief chat with our designer.
References: We’ll ask for 2–3 references, and may also reach out to others you’ve worked with (let us know if there are any sensitivities). We’ll keep it brief and respectful — usually ~15 mins per call. You’re also welcome to reference check us.
Decision: We’ll move quickly on our end.
How to apply
If interested, please drop us a line on joinus@koodos.com with your resume and your thoughts on how personalization could work for Shelf.