Careers — UpSkillZone
Build the outcome ledger.
We hire senior ICs to build a credentialing system that employers actually trust. The work is concrete: signed artifacts, calibrated rubrics, settlement that closes in ninety days. If that sounds like the job you want, the open roles are below.
§1
Hiring philosophy
The moat is real. We sell verified outcomes, not impressions or seats — every dollar of revenue is tied to a hire that an employer signed an attestation for, and every credit clause is enforceable because the underlying credential is cryptographically checkable. That reshapes the work: we are not optimizing a funnel, we are building a ledger.
We ship real artifacts. Every credential is signed. Every mentor review is logged. Every employer attestation is an Ed25519 payload at a stable URL. There is no demo-grade surface area — the things you build go straight into the chain that mints the VC, seen in the open by any third party with a verifier.
The team is small and senior. No juniors yet. Every engineer owns end-to-end slices, every operator owns a P&L line, and the founders are in the same Slack channel as the rest of the company. We will hire juniors eventually; we are not ready to be a good place for them today, and we would rather wait than pretend.
§2
Open roles
Four roles, all senior IC. Bands reflect what we will pay, not the top of a recruiter range.
Role · 01
Senior Backend Engineer
- Location
- Remote
- Band
- $200–280K USD + equity
Own modules across the FastAPI + Beanie monolith — credentials, cohorts, settlement.
Responsibilities
- Own modules in the FastAPI + Beanie monolith — credentials, cohorts, settlement.
- Run MongoDB at scale: indexing strategy, change streams, schema migrations on live data.
- Design distributed pieces — Arq queues, idempotency keys, replay-safe webhooks.
- Ship the Ed25519 signing path end-to-end, including JWKS rotation and offline verification.
Apply for Senior Backend Engineer →Subject:
[senior-backend-engineer]Role · 02
Senior Frontend Engineer
- Location
- Remote
- Band
- $200–260K USD + equity
Build learner, mentor, and employer surfaces in Next.js 14 against the existing token system.
Responsibilities
- Build the learner, mentor, and employer surfaces in Next.js 14 with the existing token system.
- Hold the line on TanStack Query patterns — cache shape, suspense boundaries, optimistic updates.
- Extend the design system (Tailwind + shadcn) without drifting from BRAND_BOOK_v0.md.
- Co-own performance budgets: Lighthouse, INP, route-level bundle size.
Apply for Senior Frontend Engineer →Subject:
[senior-frontend-engineer]Role · 03
Head of Mentor Network
- Location
- Remote / SF
- Band
- $180–230K USD + equity
Run the calibration methodology and recruit the senior IC mentors who hold the kappa floor.
Responsibilities
- Run the calibration methodology — Cohen's kappa floor of 0.7, recalibration loop, audit log.
- Recruit, contract, and pay senior IC mentors across timezones.
- Define grading SLAs and enforce them; intervene when the kappa drifts.
- Partner with engineering on rubric tooling and reviewer dashboards.
Apply for Head of Mentor Network →Subject:
[head-of-mentor-network]Role · 04
DPO / Privacy Engineer
- Location
- Remote (part-time OK)
- Band
- $180–220K USD + equity
Own GDPR posture, DPAs, and the codified retention policies inside the platform.
Responsibilities
- Own GDPR posture — DPIAs, ROPA, data-subject request flows, transfer impact assessments.
- Negotiate and maintain DPAs with employers, mentors, and subprocessors.
- Codify retention policies in the platform — TTL indexes, purge jobs, audit evidence.
- Brief the founders on regulatory exposure before product launches into a new region.
Apply for DPO / Privacy Engineer →Subject:
[dpo-privacy-engineer]
§3
Interview process
Four conversations, two weeks end-to-end if calendars align. We pay for the take-home.
- 01
Intro call · 30 minutes
A founder. We answer your questions about the company, the cap table, and the roadmap. You tell us what you are looking for.
- 02
Technical deep-dive · 60 minutes
Walk through a system you built end-to-end. We probe the trade-offs. No whiteboard riddles.
- 03
Paid take-home · ~6 hours
A scoped slice of real platform work. Paid at $150/hr regardless of outcome, capped at the agreed ceiling.
- 04
Founder + team round · 90 minutes
Review the take-home with the team you would join, plus a values conversation. Offer or written decline within three business days.
§4
Compensation philosophy
Cash bands are listed above and reflect what we will actually pay; we don't use the top of the band as bait. Equity for senior IC roles ranges from 0.5% to 2.5% on a four-year vest with a one-year cliff, sized to seniority and timing. We refresh grants annually for tenured staff, and the option pool is sized accordingly.
- Cash bands
- Listed on each role; we pay inside the band based on calibrated leveling, not negotiation skill.
- Equity
- 0.5%–2.5% senior IC, four-year vest, one-year cliff, 10y post-termination exercise window.
- Health
- Standard US health stack (medical, dental, vision); 100% employer-paid for ICs, 75% for dependents.
- Time off
- Four weeks PTO plus US federal holidays; mandatory two weeks contiguous off per year.
- Hardware
- Refreshed-every-3y laptop + $1.5K/yr peripherals; reimbursed coworking up to $400/mo.
§5 · Honest limits
What we are not hiring for
If you are looking for one of these, we are not the right shop today.
- SDRs
- Outbound to employers is run by a founder with a spreadsheet. We will hire when the spreadsheet breaks.
- Head of Marketing
- The positioning lives in the manifesto and the product copy. There is nothing to manage yet.
- Content writers
- We write the platform docs ourselves; every engineer ships the doc alongside the code.
- Junior engineers
- The team is six and the work is end-to-end ownership. We will hire juniors once we can be a good place for them; today we cannot.