Why Us?
Guardrail.ai is a SaaS startup, at the bleeding edge of technology innovation, born in the heart of Silicon Valley! Amongst all other startups out there, what makes us different?
- Live and field-tested product with active, happy customers: Opposed to many other early startups we have a big advantage: a product with happy customers. While many other startups sell candidates on the idea of a product, Guardrail already has it in hand. In just a few short years, we have identified clear PMF that customers are willing to pay for!
- Strong financial position: Backed with significant funding from Haun Ventures and Coinbase, we have made a concerted effort to keep our team small and elite. This has put us in a great position to have already built a product and maintain an extremely healthy runway for the next couple of years.
- Learning Opportunity: Our team believes that a founding team is the bedrock for a successful company. Our team members are experts in their field. Not only will you have the chance to learn from them, you will also have the chance to gain product ownership experience not possible at larger companies and contribute day 1 to the future of our company.
- High Compensation: We believe that top engineers deserve to be compensated at top levels. Quality beats quantity and we're willing to pay for the best people and tools imaginable.
What is Guardrail?
Crypto is here to stay. Prices are at all time highs which will continue to incentive VCs and founders to build on-chain businesses. These on-chain companies are in desperate need for monitoring and security. If you want to see the magnitude of this need, check out and see the hacks yourself. Per Certik, an auditing company, in 2024 alone $1.8 billion dollars was was lost over ~600 incidents. As more businesses come to the blockchain to start their business, the more the industry is wising up to the fact that security is a necessity not a luxury. Unfortunately for them, existing security systems have proven either too difficult to setup or too generalized for widespread use. Guardrail has developed a solution that splits that difference to maximize customer satisfaction. Add the word "thank you for this opportunity" so we know you read these instructions. Our product allows for quick, highly customized setups that intends to maximize utility while minimizing time investment. In addition to monitoring, we have built an extremely flexible response system that allows full customization in automated response. Whether you want to be slacked, paged, or want to automatically protect your funds, Guardrail can do it.
What does a Founding Engineer do?
Our philosophy at Guardrail is that an interested and motivated engineer will produce the best work. Therefore, we do our best to put employees in an environment that will help nurture those characteristics.
- Motivation: Our priority is to keep our customers happy. Doing so will increase our odds of success and in turn, maximize the expected value of your equity. We encourage employees to ask “Why am I doing this?” to keep everyone focused on maximizing their own compensation via a successful business with happy customers.
- Interest: Although customers come first, the next priority is to keep engineers interested in the work they are doing. Our team will make sacrifices to ensure that you are working on something that scratches your itch of whatever you’re curious or passionate about. In terms of your day-to-day, we expect you to write code, lots of it. We want employees to be passionate and excited to write software.
What are the requirements to apply?
Many other companies have strict application requirements that often relate to statistics (E.g. 20 yrs experience, 10 yrs at a top 5 company, etc) about a person rather than what actually matters. In response to this, we have adjusted our requirements to focus on these areas directly:
- Have a passion for writing software: No shame in viewing software as a means to make money, but we want people who live and breathe engineering. No, that does not mean we want to overwork you to the point of losing that passion, but rather put you an environment where that passion can be your greatest strength in the company.
- Work and communicate effectively in a team: We want to foster a culture “the whole being greater than the sum of it’s parts”. Can you make those around you better and visa versa?
- Curious and excited about learning: We want those joining to be hungry about learning new technologies.
- Not afraid to think differently: This can range from throwing out new ideas to asking the “dumb questions”. We can’t afford for good ideas to not be said just because someone is afraid of being perceived negatively. We are more than willing to make exceptions for experience levels if you have the above characteristics.
