标签：#hiring

We'll get back to you. It's a sentence almost every job seeker has heard. For some, those words become the beginning of a new career. For many others, they become another unanswered promise. But the truth is, an interview doesn't begin when someone asks, Tell me about yourself . For millions of job seekers, it begins much earlier. Before the Interview Even Begins It's 6:45 in the morning. The alarm rings. A young professional stands in front of the mirror, adjusting the outfit they've carefully prepared the night before. He checks his resume one last time, gathers his documents, confirms the location, and takes a deep breath. As he’s about to leave, someone at home asks, “Do you think this one will work out?” He smiles. “I hope so.” He walks out carrying more than a folder. He carries expectations, financial pressure, family responsibilities, and the quiet hope that this interview might finally change everything. The Hidden Cost Nobody Talks About People talk about skills, preparation, and confidence. Those matter. But there’s another side rarely discussed: the hidden costs. Transportation. Professional clothing. Internet bills. Certification courses. Resume updates. Travel. Meals. Even taking a day off from a part-time job or missing freelance work. For someone without steady income, these aren’t just expenses — they’re investments with no guaranteed return. Sometimes they lead to an offer. Often, they end in rejection or silence. A Resume Can Tell You Skills. It Can’t Tell You a Story. A resume tells recruiters what a candidate has done. It doesn't tell them what they're carrying. It doesn't reveal the father waiting for good news, the mother asking how it went, the EMI due next week, the rent that can't wait, or the confidence slowly wearing down after repeated rejections. When Expectations Change Candidates prepare for the role they applied for. Sometimes they discover the responsibilities, salary, or even the position itself has changed. Business priorities evo

"Forward Deployed Engineer" went from a Palantir-specific title to one of the hottest roles in AI in about eighteen months. But nobody had actually counted the market, so I did. I pulled every open FDE role I could find from public ATS job boards (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby) across 11 companies and analyzed all 292 of them. Here is what the data says. Who is hiring Three companies account for 250 of the 292 openings: Palantir: 95 (they coined the title, and still call many of these roles "Deployment Strategist") Databricks: 85 OpenAI: 70 Then a long tail: Cohere and Scale AI (13 each), Sierra, Writer, Modal, Baseten, Ramp, and Sardine. What it pays Of the 40 roles that disclosed a US pay band, the median ran $197K to $294K , topping out at $390K plus equity at OpenAI and Sierra, with a floor around $137K. That is senior-software-engineer money for a role a lot of engineers have never heard of. International and most Palantir roles did not publish bands, so the true market is likely even broader. Three things that surprised me 1. 98% of these roles are customer-facing. This is the defining trait. It is not a backend role with occasional meetings. It is an engineer who lives in the customer's world, and if that sounds terrible to you, this is not a role you would enjoy occasionally. It is the whole job. 2. The title is chaos. The same role goes by at least four names: Forward Deployed Engineer (152), Forward Deployed Software Engineer (58), AI or Deployment Engineer (43), and Deployment Strategist (36). If you only search one term, you miss most of the market. 3. The job descriptions undersell the technical bar. JDs emphasize customer-facing work, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), Python, and integrations. But SQL and algorithms show up in only about a third of them, even though every FDE loop I have seen tests live coding and SQL under time pressure. The description sells the breadth. The interview tests the depth. The other details Geography: about 48% USA, but genuinely global

Cross-posted from noflattery.com/decide — where I ran this exact question through a council of four different frontier models and let them argue it out. You're a solo founder at ~$8K MRR. You have runway for exactly one full-time hire. Which role unlocks the most growth? (A) a second engineer to ship features faster (B) a marketer to build a real acquisition channel (C) a customer-success / support hire to cut churn and free your time (D) a salesperson to chase larger deals The intuitive answer for most technical founders is A — more shipping velocity. The case below is for C , and it's stronger than it looks. (With one caveat that can flip the whole thing — stick around for it.) TL;DR: At ~$8K MRR solo, hire customer success first if churn is real or support is eating your week . If voluntary churn is under ~3% and support is light, hire a marketer instead. Engineer and sales come later. The case for customer success first 1. Churn quietly eats growth before features can add it. At $8K MRR, 5% monthly churn is ~$400/month bleeding out before you grow an inch. Across bootstrapped SaaS in the $5–15K MRR band, the strongest predictor of reaching $50K isn't feature velocity or channel — it's net revenue retention above 90% . That's a customer-success function, not an engineering one. 2. You are the bottleneck, and support is eating you. As a solo founder you're doing product, sales, billing, and support. If support takes ~15 hours a week, that's nearly 40% of your capacity — and it's the cheapest thing to hand off. A CS hire costs less than a senior engineer or an experienced salesperson, and it buys back the hours (and the headspace) you need to think strategically again. 3. It's a research department in disguise. A CS hire generates the highest volume of qualitative signal: why people leave, what they actually use, what they'd pay more for. An engineer builds what you think users want. CS tells you what they actually need — which means the engineer you hire next buil

While AI dominates the layoff narrative, engineers as a share of total new hires have actually increased, according to SignalFire data.

The Budget You Approved Isn't the Budget You'll Pay You approved $180K for a senior AI engineer. Eighteen months later, you've spent $282K and you're still not sure the hire is working out. This isn't unusual. It's the rule. Companies hiring AI engineers for the first time routinely underestimate total cost by 40–60%. Here's a breakdown of where that gap comes from — and why most founders don't see it until it's too late. The 56% Gap: Where It Comes From 1. Recruiting Costs Are Higher Than You Think (~12–18% of first-year salary) AI engineer recruiting isn't like standard software recruiting. Specialized headhunters charge 20–25% of first-year salary. Even if you find someone through your network, you'll spend founder or VP time on 15–30 hours of interviewing, plus take-home evals that the best candidates increasingly decline. If you use a staffing firm, add the markup. If you DIY it, add the opportunity cost. Typical recruiting overhead: $22,000–$40,000 per hire 2. Onboarding Takes Longer for AI Roles (~2–3 months of ramp) An AI engineer hired to build production agent systems isn't productive on day 1. They need to understand your domain, your data, your existing architecture, and your risk tolerance for AI-generated outputs. The ramp is real — most teams see 60–90 days before meaningful output. At $180K salary, two months of ramp is $30,000 in salary with limited ROI. Add engineering time for mentoring (typically 20% of a senior engineer's time during ramp), and you're adding another $15,000–$20,000. Ramp cost: $30,000–$50,000 3. Infrastructure Spend Scales With Experiments AI engineers experiment. That's the job. Every experiment has a GPU bill, an API bill, and a storage bill. Early-stage teams routinely see $3,000–$8,000/month in AI infrastructure spend once they've hired their first AI engineer — much of it from exploratory work that doesn't ship. Over a year: $36,000–$96,000 in infra costs that weren't in the original headcount budget 4. Tooling and Data Cos

Hey friends 👋 As the title suggests, we are hiring! If you've been with us for a little while, I'm sure you've seen our uptick in community initiatives since Major League Hacking (MLH) acquired DEV earlier this year. We've been working hard behind the scenes to bring new opportunities to the community and give a fresh spin to previous programs. We're now at a point where we need help optimizing and scaling up everything we do, while ensuring the platform remains a special place. That said, we are looking to hire a full-time, remote Community Program Manager based in the United States that cares deeply about community. Below is a brief overview of the role and skills we're looking for, but here's the full job description and application for anyone that wants to jump right in: Community Program Manager Job Application Job Overview Key Responsibilities You will... Develop and grow our community moderator programs Run DEV Challenges A-Z, plus other fun events Oversee our community support operations And more! Important Skills You are someone who... Effectively communicates with both internal and external stakeholders Can't help but be detailed oriented (sorry, I am pedantic) Uses AI to gain efficiency Knows how to work autonomously and manages up Benefits You'll receive... Competitive salary ($80-110k) Stock options Medical, dental, vision benefits and 401K Unlimited PTO Travel opportunities Questions about the role? Drop them in the comments below!

Hey Dev.to the community, I'm Ashwin Gururaj — a Data Scientist & AI Engineer based in Melbourne, Australia, currently open to full-time, contract, and internship opportunities. I specialise in building production-grade AI systems — not just notebooks and demos, but end-to-end pipelines that actually run in production. What I work with: Python · LangChain · LangGraph · FastAPI · RAG pipelines · pgvector · Multi-agent systems · LLMs · Groq · HuggingFace · Pydantic · Docker · Celery · Redis · PostgreSQL · Data Science · SQL · Pandas · Scikit-learn What I've built recently: Sift — an open-source multi-agent fact-checking pipeline. Takes any text, extracts every factual claim, retrieves grounded evidence via HyDE RAG + live web search, and returns auditable verdicts with cited sources. Built with LangGraph, pgvector, FastAPI, and Docker. → GitHub Open to: Full-time Data Scientist / AI Engineer / ML Engineer roles Remote or Melbourne-based Companies building serious AI products If you're hiring or know someone who is — I'd genuinely appreciate a connection. GitHub: https://github.com/ashg2099 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwin-gururaj-93943816a/ Thanks!