Oso is headquartered in New York City. We have a beautiful office near Flatiron.

In the near-term, we're focused on hiring in New York City. Long-term though, we expect roughly half the team to be remote and half to be in New York City.

The interview process varies by role, but here are our core principles, plus the specific process for the Software Engineer role farther below.

Core Principles

• Make the interviewing process reflect the work as closely as possible. We try to achieve this in two ways:
  
  • Domain - We deliberately pick problems that are tied closely to the work we’re doing, as opposed to computer science fundamentals, for example.
  • Format - We try to give you as much context in advance as possible, including having you do part of the problems before the onsite. That's because it's unlikely we'd ever give you a problem in real life and ask you to SOLVE IT ON THE SPOT 🙂 We don't, for instance, ask you to solve algorithms at the whiteboard. You should ask questions – lots of them – and we'll answer them.
• Make the process bi-directional. We want to see what it would be like to work with you, and equally, we want you to get the chance to see what it would be like to work with us. To this end:
  • The main technical interview is effectively a pairing session with Nick, Oso's cofounder & CTO or other senior engineers from our team.
  • We budget lots of time throughout the process for you to engage with us in discussion on the problems (and hope you do!)
• Be as transparent as humanly possible. Oso cofounder & CEO, Graham Neray, wrote a blog post on this topic, but some of the basics here include:
  • Sharing the principles
  • Sharing the process
  • Being straightforward about exactly what we're looking for
    
  • Giving you feedback at any point throughout the process
    

Interview Process

Here's the interview process for a Software Engineer (taken from internal company Notion doc). Note: we are constantly evolving this process, so what's on this page might lag slightly.

• You learn about what we’re up to as a company, the team, and we’ll answer any preliminary questions
  
• We learn about your background, interests, and check off a few logistical boxes
  

• We’ll discuss the company vision, go deeper into the specifics of the product, speak about the engineering team in more depth
  
• We’ll want to understand why you’re interested in Oso, and validate that there’s alignment with our 4 Oso expectations
  

• Use the language of your choice with your preferred debugging environment
  
• Showcase your problem solving skills
• Ask our engineers what it's like to work at Oso
  

• Work through a case study with our CTO, Nick (120 min)
  
• Chat with Cofounder & CEO, Graham, on who you are (60 mins)
• Chat with a member of our marketing team, Stephie, to further validate alignment with our Oso expectations (60 mins)
  

We're always happy to hear from you if you think there's a different interview or process that we should try to see who you are when you're at your best 🙂

If you ask anyone on the team, they'll tell you that the workload is reasonable. It's probably also true that we work harder than most. How can these 2 things be true?

What's special about being at an early-stage company like Oso – in particular one where we push everyone to take ownership over product – is everything is meaningful. It's a tight loop from your work --> customer.

In practice, this means we don’t operate 9-5, but we also don't manage to ‘time spent in seat' and we're not wed to specific hours. We have a small number of recurring meetings. We expect that everyone has a life outside Oso (hobbies, errands, exercise, regular vacation, etc.). The emphasis isn’t on ‘being online’ – rather on setting and achieving big goals together.

Yes, we have raised $25M from investors like Sequoia, Felicis, Harpoon, SV Angel, Company Ventures and Highland Capital, as well as entrepreneurs like Dev Ittycheria (CEO, MongoDB), Calvin French-Owen (Founder, Segment), Charity Majors (Founder, Honeycomb), Edith Harbaugh (Founder, LaunchDarkly), Olivier Pomel (Founder and CEO, Datadog), Armon Dadgar (Founder and CTO, Hashicorp), Christina Cacioppo (Founder and CEO, Vanta), Paul Copplestone (Founder and CEO, Supabase), Ryan Petersen (Founder, Flexport), David Petersen (Founder, BuildZoom), and technical advisor Abhishek Parmar (co-creator of Google Zanzibar&Airbnb Himeji).

Our job description is the best representation of what we are looking for. The requirements are the only requirements in terms of raw skills and experience. The Who You Are section is equally important, as we believe not everyone will enjoy and thrive in a startup environment and it's in everyone's best interest to find the right fit on both sides.

One additional point that we often discuss internally is that we value performance at the end of Year 1 vs. performance on Day 1. If we wanted to build a company to get acquired in the next year, we’d optimize for a new hire’s performance on days 1-90. But we are building a company for the long-term, which means that we optimize for long-term upside in the people we bring into the team. Given the choice between a candidate that is good immediately but has limited upside, and a candidate that will take a bit of time to ramp but will be a much stronger contributor to the company after 6/12/18 months, we choose the latter.

• Competitive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental healthcare to all employees and anyone in their family through Spring Health
• Unlimited access to financial advisors through Northstar
• Equity package
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO)
  
• Paid parental leave
• Flexible work options
• One Medical concierge healthcare services
  
• Quarterly hackathons... and prizes!
  
• Free team lunches every month
  
• Keyboards and cold brew
  

We build the core of Oso in Rust. We use React and TypeScript for the frontend, Pulumi for infrastructure-as-code, and AWS. We also use SQLite.

Not at this time—unfortunately, we don’t have the bandwidth necessary to offer a stellar internship program. We need to invest every ounce of energy into making a successful product and community first.