About Poka Labs

Chemicals are in virtual everything we see, touch, and (yes) eat. They’re a core building block for modern civilization, yet the industry runs on paper, spreadsheets, and antiquated tech. For a $5.7 trillion dollar industry that generates a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, this means hundreds of billions in lost efficiency and wasted emissions.

At Poka Labs, we’re on a mission to bring cutting-edge software and AI to chemical manufacturers.

Our first tool automates production scheduling and we’ve already signed enterprise customers that are using our product. We’re also backed by leading investors in the vertical software space and our founders have previously saved $100+ million for chemical companies.

Role: Founding Engineer

Overview

As the Founding Engineer at Poka Labs, you will be an integral part of our product build out. Your role will be dynamic, adapting as we deepen our understanding of customer needs and the industry’s demands. In your first three months, you might:

• Visit a chemical plant to see our software in action, learning firsthand about workflows in order intake, production scheduling, and management.
• Build a LLM-based RAG system that connects to a customer’s email accounts to alert them when their supplier has a delay.
• Integrate with a customers’ order and inventory system
• Add new constraints to our optimization engine so that it can handle the shift schedules of plant personnel.
• Plan, design, and build new features in React.

We hope you are excited by the breadth of work that an early-stage company requires, but are also flexible enough to adapt as plans change.

Responsibilities

• Product Development: You’ll both design and build product at a lightning speed, talking with users and iterating on feedback.
• Infrastructure Management: Own our infrastructure from the ground up. You’ll work collaboratively to quickly implement solutions that unblock us, whether it’s setting up queuing systems or managing data flows.
• Customer Engagement: Be prepared to step out of the office and into plants
• Stay on the Cutting Edge: Various AI technologies are central to our product. You’ll be critical in evaluating new technologies and how they can give us a competitive advantage.

What we’re looking for

• Experience: You feel comfortable on both the frontend and backend, and have some infrastructure and DevOps experience. This can come from formal work or side projects. In fact learning through side project impresses us a lot, mention those in your application.
• Skills: We’re incorporating state-of-the-art MIPS solvers, Claude and OpenAI models. We combine these with classic technologies (Typescript, React, and Python) and run on AWS. These technologies can be quick to learn, but we hope you have experience with some of them already.
• Communication: It is critical that you can explain highly technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders. Using fancy words isn’t impressive, but being able to explain why that queuing system we set up last week is failing this morning so we can make a quick decision on how to fix it, is impressive.
• An Eye for Design: We don’t have a designer yet so we may need you to drop into Figma to whip up some mocks to show at that user demo on Monday.
• Speed: Life moves pretty fast. Our biggest advantage as a startup is to be able to ship product 10x quicker than the legacy players in the industry, and in our industry we think we can do it 100x faster.
• Location: Based in or willing to relocate to San Franscisco.

What We Offer

• Impact: Make a significant impact as a member of the founding team, with the opportunity to shape the company's future.
• Culture: We like to think we’re fun, but we’ll count on you to help shape the culture and traditions of the company. Think we should have Magic Mondays, where we we watch magician YouTube videos, and bet on how they are done? Sure, why not. Note: include a crazy suggestion for a tradition in your application so we know you’ve read this far.
• Collaboration: Work directly with experienced founders from YCombinator who deeply understand the industry we are working in.

Join Us

At Poka Labs, we’ve got a lot of exciting work ahead of us. We hope you’ll join us as we bring modern software to an industry that badly needs it.