Ardent AI | Founding Engineer | REMOTE | Full time | $160-200K, 0.5-2.0% equity
Ardent [0] is a well-funded, early-stage startup founded by an ex-Stripe engineer and three-time founder. We're building a platform which helps users blend the creativity of generative AI with the determinism of executable code.
We want to help everyone build software, whether or not they know how to code. We aren't trying to put software engineers out of work — instead, we envision a future where AI makes it possible for everyone to build software that makes them more efficient, productive, and happier!
We raised ~$2.5M last year, and we're hiring two engineers to join the founding team. We're looking for highly motivated and talented candidates with experience working on a fully remote team, a strong interest in artificial intelligence, and alignment with our principles and way of working. [1]
Our interview process is efficient, and we don't do Leetcode or grueling all-day interview loops. We won't waste your time, we will stay in constant contact throughout, and we will get you an answer quickly.
Please note — You must be be a resident of, and eligible to work in, the United States. We are not currently sponsoring visas. This is a full-time, direct-hire position, and we are not interested in working with agencies or consultancies.
This assumes that Osama bin Laden has poor enough opsec that he's using (eg.) Discord without a proxy. State actors have much more sophisticated techniques available.
(It's still an interesting vector, though! But it's true that the headline and writeup are a bit sensationalized.)
> Sounds worrying to me as it means this is essentially a lifetime drug. As soon as you stop taking it, your appetite returns and so does your old weight.
I see this said all the time about GLP-1 agonists, and it's a mischaracterization. It is true that when you stop taking the drug, your appetite is no longer suppressed, but you can still keep the weight off by eating a sustainable amount of calories.
Usually, the biggest challenge with weight loss is sticking with it, since it's normally miserable and takes a very long time. Taking a GLP-1 agonist speeds the process and makes it much more tolerable. I lost ~45 lbs. (~205 to ~160) in 6 months by taking tirzepatide (Mounjaro), and if I had done it without the drug it would have taken at least twice as long and been much more difficult.
It's true that the solution is more complicated than "just eat fewer calories", but it's also true that some people just need their baseline to be reset.
I'm perfectly capable of maintaining my weight at ~160 lbs, but losing a large amount of weight to get there was difficult enough that I didn't try. A friend did pretty much everything to lose weight after she had children but couldn't, went on GLP-1 agonist for a few months, lost it all and kept it off since.
People always lament that, like most drugs, the effects of a GLP-1 agonist stop when you stop taking it. What I'm saying is it doesn't necessarily matter. Some people will need continued support, some won't. Taking the drug isn't a "life sentence" and you aren't guaranteed to re-gain the weight after you stop.
> We do know that the benefits stop as soon as you stop taking it. You'll start gaining back weight.
It's more accurate to say that if you're depending on the appetite suppression to eat a sustainable amount of calories, you will begin to gain weight again after stopping the drug.
It's possible to use a GLP-1 agonist to lose weight and then keep it off with a proper diet. I took tirzepatide (Mounjaro) for 6 months, lost ~45 lbs., and have not gained any back after stopping the drug in July.
So what changed for you? Why are you now able to control your calorie intake, but not before (or maybe you could have, but just didn't do it that way)?
By "reached into his own pocket," you mean he leveraged engineering resources from Twitter, and then once it became clear that Grok wasn't a competitive model, raised $6,000,000,000 in capital from VCs and sovereign wealth funds [1] to pay for the additional compute necessary?
Stripe does use Bazel. It just didn't exist before Stripe built some of its own internal systems, but it's gradually replacing ~everything from a build standpoint.
The one thing to know about Bazel is that it's both incredibly impressive, and also one of the least ergonomic pieces of software ever created. It's very clearly an internal project which was cleaned up and open sourced without any attempt to make it more usable outside of Google.
Bazel's kind of like Kubernetes in a way -- you don't actually get enough benefits to adopt it until you're at a certain point in the company lifecycle, and to get to that point you usually have to build other systems first. Then you have to gradually replace those systems with Bazel.
The biggest difference not mentioned is the article is that code is no longer kept on developer machines. The sync process described in the article was well-designed, but also was a fairly constant source of headaches. (For example, sometimes the file watcher would miss an update and the code on your remote machine would be broken in strange ways, and you'd have to recognize that it was a sync issue instead of an actual problem with your code.) As a result, the old devbox system was superseded by "remote devboxes", which also host the code. Engineers use VSCode remote development via SSH. It works shockingly well for a codebase the size of Stripe's.
There are actually several different monorepos at Stripe, which is a constant source of frustration. There have been lots of efforts to try to unify the codebase into a single git repo, but it was difficult for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the "main" monorepo was already testing the limits of the solution used for git hosting.
Overall, maintaining good developer productivity is an extremely challenging problem. This is especially true for a company like Stripe, which is both too large to operate as a "small" company and too small to operate as a "big" company. Even with a well-funded team of lots of super talented people putting forth their best efforts, it's tough to keep all of the wheels fully greased.
Glad to see that they moved to code living with the execution environment. The code living separate from the execution environment seemed like too much overhead and complexity for not enough benefit.
Especially given VSCode, or Cursor ;), work so well via ssh.
To the engineers that don't want to use those IDE's it might suck temporarily, but that's it.
IntelliJ is also supported. If you want to use something else, like VIM, then you need to ssh into the remote devbox machine. They have support for custom dotfiles, so you can set up your cool VIM environment for all your remote devboxes.
If you don't want remote devboxes, the regular devboxes still work. You just need to deal with the additional pain for syncing the files.
> So basically I get to do all the work for like 1/50th of what the founder has?
Who raised the money that the company is using to pay salaries? When investors put money into a seed company, they're largely betting on the founders' perceived skillset and previous experience (or other bona fides like education).
One thing that most people don't realize is that being a founder means that you're inextricably tied to the company for its lifespan. Losing a founder is terrible optics and can be a death sentence for a startup. Regardless of the actual reason, every subsequent investor conversation will involve an explanation of what happened.
If you want more equity, you should ask for it! And you definitely shouldn't take a job where you'd feel under-compensated! But realistically, if you want a "founder-level" equity, you have to start your own company.
> Have you been an employee in a startup? Because in my experience it has a lot of the downs of the founder, but none of the ups.
Have you been a founder? If not, I'm not sure you fully realize what goes into the job. Everyone wants to be a founder, but nobody wants to _be_ a founder.
> I'm not sure you fully realize what goes into the job.
Can it be a lot worse than working as many hours as possible and burning out? Because startup employees do that, without the compensation the founders get.
My advice would be not to do that. Set firm boundaries when you discuss the role and then enforce them. No employee will ever care as deeply about a company as its founder, and good founders understand that.
To be fair, most startups fail, and the founders of these companies can end up with similar or worse compensation than their employees. Maybe they've volunteered to take a lower salary than their early employee. Maybe because by the time they've started hiring employees, they've been working without any salary at all, burning through their savings and credit cards for a year or more before getting any meaningful funding.
