Automate anything on a computer without a line of code
Founding Engineer
About the role
Nearly all our largest competitors are massive products built over a decade ago, and require the support of large services organizations to operate-- our goal is to do whatever's necessary to get users an equally powerful computer automation platform they’ll actually be able to use by themselves, and extract immediate value from.
Your role
Your work will without a doubt make a direct contribution to our core platform and our customer experience. This is a pretty technical role, so you’ll need to be willing to work across and make tangible progress across a variety of technologies, including an Electron desktop app (built with Vue.js), and a Python backend.
Qualities we’re looking for
- You can evaluate and are honest about how much your work is moving the needle for the business at any given point in time, and are actively interested in contributing to movement on every front.
- You are bringing/can develop meaningful opinions about this platform and RPA, and mostly undirected, you could conceive and execute on meaningful additions to our products with business value at will.
- You hide technical complexity, not behind it, even if it might make us look behind in the short term. It saves much time if we can consistently focus on tangible product/business movement, and not on the weeds of new tech.
Skills we’ll need
- Strong knowledge of core JS, Vue, and Python at a minimum, and an ability to source/learn/implement libraries quickly
- Strong design sense and a high bar for features that you work on and that you're willing to release
We’re also excited to see…
- Experience working on Electron applications
- Experience building Chrome extensions
- Experience building no-code interfaces and application logic for “editor” applications
- Impressive Python projects
Why you should join Prefix
We build products that allow every person capable of using a desktop computer to automate repetitive work with business software. Human time is an incredibly valuable and limited resource, and yet we spend huge swathes of it, despite increasingly modern work environments, on repetitive and robotic maintenance tasks, especially within larger organizations. Automating these tasks away is a broadly defined, but incredibly large and tangible industry, and we're looking for people up to the challenges of staking real ground in it.
What we do
There are several types of digital automation products of varying popularities and varying difficulties to develop. We're focusing on building among the hardest but most applicable kind, robotic process automation (RPA), and making it as intuitive as possible for non-technical buyers to use. Robotic automations don't stop at integrations between popular apps— they can actually simulate using the computer the way a human operator would, using computer vision and statistics to identify on-screen buttons to click on and text fields to type in. If our users need to work with desktop applications, fill out online forms, or connect with internal tools on a regular basis, we make sure they can do so automatically, all without a line of code.
What we do differently
Creating the last automation platform means acknowledging first and foremost automation is an incredibly crowded and confusing market, both for new entrants and for buyers. We think automation, especially RPA solutions, are currently criminally oversold and are being designed for third-party service providers, instead of the customers that actually need and would directly benefit from automation. And though service providers often do well with the largest businesses (and help sell automation to them), we think they prove cost-prohibitive pretty much everywhere else. It is important for us to be transparent with ourselves and with customers that there are both limits to where automation can be useful to them, and limits to the amount of resources they can reasonably dedicate to figuring out how to implement it. And we think offering a product that customers can viably own and use themselves dramatically aligns incentives to create positive ROI for them long-term.
Who we are
Prefix is currently a few people backed by some great early investors, founders, and angels. We're based in Palo Alto and do have a preference for folks in the area, but are open to remote hires that prove great fits. As a particularly small team, joining us would mean playing a founding role with a direct and immediate impact to our business. Happy to hop on a phone call and discuss our investors, runway, and future financial plans should you be interested in learning more.
