Founding Engineer

Slidely is a PowerPoint plugin that makes it easy to create beautiful company-branded slides rapidly. Slidely is already used by several consulting companies and teams at Fortune 500 companies.

Who are we?​

Hi! We’re a small but strong team of 3:
Apoorve, co-founder & CEO, product & sales

Nikhil, co-founder & CTO, product & engineering

Dinesh, engineer, engineering

Both founders are CS graduates from IIT Kharagpur with a specialization in AI.

Slidely is officially set up in the US, but all 3 of us work out of Bangalore. Slidely is new, but revenue-making. We are funded by amazing investors like Y Combinator and supported by prominent leaders, founders and executives.

What languages and tools do we work with?

Our main product is a PowerPoint add-in (client) that users install on their PC.

Languages -
Client logic: The code for the client is written in VB.NET (visual basic .net), a strongly-typed object-oriented language and is much like Python in its syntax.

Client design: The design of the client is done in XAML, an extension of XML, that has live preview at design-time. We use the Telerik UI for WPF library, which provides good-looking components like buttons and treeviews out-of-the-box but are still customizable.

Server: For some operations, the client interfaces with the Slidely server. The Slidely server is a Node application written in Typescript, running on an EC2 instance. A live status of our prod and test servers can be seen here.

IDEs -
Our client is developed on Visual Studio, which has nice support for working on VB.NET and XAML.

Our server is developed on Visual Studio Code, which plays nicely with Typescript development.

Tools -

We provide you with any software that improves your productivity.

1. Github Copilot (but we are happy to purchase any other software you feel makes you productive)!
2. ChatGPT/Claude

Do you want to help build a startup?

• If you do not want ambiguity or surprises, this role is not for you. We’re early-stage, and the journey is only going to be uphill. Expect things to be difficult and change unexpectedly.
• We work 6 days a week. As a small team trying to bring about a massive change, more hours means more work done (for now). This won’t continue indefinitely but for the foreseeable future, we don’t expect it to change. So if you’re currently looking to prioritize work-life balance, this role is not for you.
• You’ll be the one finding answers, watch those answers become redundant at some point, and then find new answers! You want ownership, in spirit and reality.
• You want to work in a high-trust environment. We prefer autonomy, and reach out to our teammates for help when needed. We want to work with people who enjoy a similar level of autonomy, and who we can trust to proactively communicate when help is needed.
• You are a very resourceful person, for whom there is no task below you. You try to find the best answer, but will get your hands dirty and get the job done when a straightforward answer isn’t apparent.

Your first 90 days

• Join us in ideating and building features to serve our existing customers
• Smooth out the rough edges in the product, create an amazing user onboarding experience
• Create workflows, including UIs and robust extensible data formats, for labelling data for AI and other search use cases. This will also involve you manually labelling some data with other team members to understand best practices.
• Design the product, talk to our customers, do lots of thinking and exploring, and play around with some wild ideas!

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone who -

• Has 2+ years of experience writing clean, modular object-oriented code
• Has 1+ years experience working with asynchronous programming and REST APIs
• Comfortable with basic Git
• Has experience with LLMs and playing around with prompts to get best results
• Has experience coming up with, and following good design patterns (logical class architectures, MVVM pattern, etc.)
• Can thoroughly test your code, and come up with all potential edge cases

It’d be more attractive to us if you also have -

• Have foundational knowledge of Computer Science (degree not needed, self-learning is also great!)
• Has experience working at an early stage startup (pre-seed/seed)
• Have built and launched a tool end-to-end that involved some UI like Android/iOS/Flutter/HTML-CSS etc. (a UNIQUE toy hobby project works as long as it's not a clone)
• Worked with GCP/AWS EC2/S3

Pay and benefits​

1. Cash: USD 24k–42k (₹20-35 lac INR) per annum
2. Equity: 0.5 - 1%, 4 year vesting period including a 1-year cliff.
   
   Note 1 - We have set up terms that are industry-leading in their friendliness to team members! If you leave Slidely, you will have 10 years from when they were granted to exercise them. Note that the exact deadline you have for exercise is whatever is written on your share options agreement under 'Expiration Date'. The industry standard is to only give you 90 days to exercise after leaving, which we think is bogus and unfair.
   
   Note 2 - We expect some of these terms like ESOPs, valuation, exercise window etc. might be alien so we are happy to explain them and answer any questions!
3. We are open to adjusting the cash and equity proportions
4. We'll cover the basics: one-time relocation costs, workstation enhancements, software licenses you need, etc.

(If there's anything else we can do to make your work more enjoyable, just ask, we'll try.)

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about Slidely’s interview process.

At Slidely, we’re looking for product engineers who enjoy iterating, taking product decisions, shipping, and exhibit a strong sense of ownership and autonomy. Our small teams of engineers largely define and drive their own roadmap, and use their product sense to define and ship an MVP.

Our interview process is designed to find these kinds of engineers. Moreover, we try to ask questions that are relevant to the types of products we build -- mostly full stack work, with a bit of analysis, and very sparingly grunt work. In most cases, the interview process we have is language agnostic, as we offer the opportunity to learn our stack.

1. Phone screen

   This stage is a more informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you. We are looking for people with a strong interest in startups and motivation to help them; this is usually exhibited by past experience working at or starting one yourself.

   Additionally, we’re a small software team. This means limited opportunities to “grow” compared to larger organizations, and fewer opportunities to manage. That said, we recognize and reward people who are inclined to be more product-minded, and have a good sense of what the Slidely team should be building. In this chat, you’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at Slidely makes sense for you.

   Lastly, the conversation will cover some light technical discussion about programming and your past projects. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship fairly involved systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making product or technical decisions.

2. Technical Screen

   Our first technical screen can be either remote or in-person (if you’re in Bangalore), and is intended as a first pass to assess your algorithmic reasoning skills.

   We only wish to test your skills and their directly applicability on your performance at work, so we use 2-3 real-life problems we have faced/are currently facing/will likely face for Slidely.
   We avoid competitive programming problems as those don’t translate well to the programming challenges we face daily.

   We will have a development environment ready for you. During the interview, you’re also free to Google for syntax. We believe this helps developers feel more comfortable during the process, and avoids any syntax gotchas.

   While we highly encourage you to use AI as part of your daily work at Slidely, we’ve found it often adds noise to the interview process so we avoid it.

3. Work Day

   At work day, you do a full day’s work alongside us in our Bangalore office. This round usually happens on a Saturday.

   The goal of work day is for you to develop a feature we might want in Slidely. You will be owning the feature end-to-end, starting with the user experience, taking relevant product decisions, thinking about edge -cases, and implementing a working solution. Of course, we will be there to assist and guide you, but the onus of communication will be on you. This process is a deeper dive into your technical abilities, product thinking and overall fit. For the “fit” portion, we are again looking for ownership and autonomy, but we also dig deeper into communication. This is evaluated throughout the process -- in how you communicate your approach, solutions and overall thinking. In general, it helps to have researched Slidely, and gone through as much material as you can find online.
   
   We’ll provide dinner for you to get to know more about the team. (We’ll cover costs of travel and accommodations if needed.)

We have found that going through this process gives us enough to make a go/no-go decision. But during the first 2 months, we keep the option open for either the candidate or Slidely to part ways on an early notice of 3 days in case it turns out to not be a great fit for either of us.

We offer feedback to candidates who request it, and relate the feedback to the skills, qualification and interview process above.

Timing

The typical interview process takes 2-3 weeks from start to finish, but we have accommodated as short as one week. We are happy to accommodate candidates who might have a short timeline or competing offers. The more information you can share about your situation and where you are in the process, the more we can either attempt to expedite/match, or save you time if we cannot.