Secret Application for Member of Technical Staff

Congratulations on cracking the Listen Labs billboard puzzle! We are in search of engineers with your level of curiosity and grit. We build AI-driven interviews at scale, distilling truth from noise. If that’s your kind of challenge, we’d love to get to know you.

Background

Write code and talk to customers. That's the YC secret on building a great company. Writing code is getting easier, so talking to customers becomes even more important.

That's what Listen does. It's an AI that talks to hundreds of your customers per week and tells you how to improve your product or messaging. Listen handles:

1. Designing the interviews.

2. Finding the right participants.

3. Conducting video interviews.

4. Analyzing the responses.

Fortune 500 companies spend $100M+/year on consultants to do just that.

Our customers, including Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Canva, Sony, SKIMS, and Nestlé, have realized millions in ROI through improved products, advertising, and strategic decisions.

Why Join Listen

1. Gigantic Market: Almost every company on earth wants to understand its customers better. We are winning with the most sophisticated players from Google to Anthropic.

2. We have never lost a deal to a competitor: (We occasionally lose deals because a customer does nothing).

3. Our founders are serial entrepreneurs (previous AI startup exit): The team has backgrounds from Jane Street, Tesla Autopilot, IOI, ICPC, Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, UC Berkeley. Our CTO reported directly to Elon Musk at Tesla.

4. The product is highly viral: Customers can share interviews to tens of thousands of users. That means free pipeline and a strong PLG motion. We receive inbound from Fortune 500s every day.

5. Backed by the best: Sequoia led our Series A ($27M total), together with Conviction, Pear, and AI Grant.

Technical Challenges

1. McKinsey On Demand: Building a research agent
   Hiring McKinsey is different than buying software. You don't just get tools, but get opinions, experience, and execution. We build Listen with that perspective: You have an AI agent on your side that knows everything about our platform and the best practices in research. It helps you set up your project, conducts interviews with your goals in mind, and analyses thousands of responses for you.

2. Database of Humanity
   One of the key value props is our ability to find the people you are looking for (eg, "power users of ChatGPT and Excel"). We are building a database of millions of humans. The more studies you do with Listen, the better we understand you. This enables finding people with unmatched accuracy, and in the long run, being able to extrapolate what a person would say based on all previous conversations -- imagine answering questions for your best friend.

3. Realtime Video Interviews
   The next version of our AI interviewer will have emotional understanding of video and voice to read between the lines. The goal is to make our interviewer more nuanced and effective than the most senior user researchers. This involves computer vision, speech analysis, and real-time decision making.

4. Distributed Information Mining
   The most interesting information is not publicly accessible on the web but only lives in people's minds. We are building an agent that, given a question, finds the right people to talk to, asks the right questions, and comes back with a report and actionable recommendations. That's what consultants charge millions for. The ceiling is incredibly high, and we are pushing the technical boundaries to help companies from investment firms to tech companies make the best decisions.

5. Customer Preference Model & Synthetic Personas
   We're bringing Jeff Bezos' vision of the customer being part of every decision to life. We're building the deepest understanding of customers, which will allow us to extrapolate to new questions via synthetic personas. This involves complex modeling of human behavior, preferences, and decision-making processes.

Team

The engineering team includes:

• Three IOI medallists

• Senior Staff engineer

• Previous companies are from Jane Street, Tesla Autopilot, Affirm

• We are growing aggressively in the next months

Investors: We're backed by Sequoia Capital, Conviction, AI Grant among others.

What we look for

• You want to solve problems end-to-end: Our team is split vertically, so every engineer owns a part of the product end-to-end and needs to make decisions from LLM pipeline, infra, backend, to UX (with help!).

• You have a high bar for quality: In a startup, moving fast is important. But even more important is to care about your output, obsess about details, and build a product that works, especially in the time of AI. Slop compounds!

• You want to push LLM capabilities: We continually push the most advanced AI models to their limits and work with the foundational companies on their new releases.

• You are a clear thinker and communicator: We only have one meeting a week and expect you to communicate tradeoffs, problems, and blockers directly.

• You are highly technical: Most of our team has started coding as young teenagers and nerd out on details from language design to compilers.