Strange Loop https://www.strangelooplabs.ai automates operations at the world’s largest financial institutions with specialized AI agents.
We are a team of engineers (and only engineers) who own both the customer relationship and product end-to-end. Our goal is to remove as many layers as possible between the customer, the engineer, and the product. We don’t have salespeople, product managers, or layers of management, nor do we divide engineers into platform/ML/FDE silos. Our average week involves:
- Mastering our customers’ processes as well as their associates
- Building AI agents that automate it
- Carrying what we learn in the field back into a robust, scalable cloud platform
This model is not right for many exceptional engineers, nor should most companies adopt it. But if this sounds like the kind of company you want to build, we’d love to hear from you.
In addition to your resume, please include a 1-2 page essay as a cover letter on which principle from the essays below resonates most deeply with you, and provide at least one example from your career of when you have applied that principle (or a time when you wished you had applied it):
Our Company Principles
As focused as we are on building great solutions for our customers, we are just as focused on building a great company. We have learnt from the good, the bad, and the ugly that our industry has to offer, and are using this to create the company we always wanted to work for.
Stay small
As anyone who has worked at a large organization knows, keeping hundreds or thousands of people aligned, communicating, and working effectively is difficult, if not impossible. More people, more problems.
At Strange Loop, we choose to stay small. This means everyone knows each other, is aligned on strategy, and can re-use the cool stuff others have built. We are energized by figuring out how to get more out of our small team.
No middle
Staying small requires us to remove a lot of the waste that exists at larger companies. One of those things is the expansive tier of project, product, and middle managers required to keep the behemoth running.
At Strange Loop, Engineers speak directly with customers. This enables them to build better products and work around deadlines. Engineers feel the pain of their users, and the relief when they solve it.
Remote first
Talented people deserve to work where they want. They will not do better work if they live in a particular part of the world, or with a manager looking over their shoulder.
Remote work introduces a number of challenges, just as in-office does. We are committed to continually finding better ways of solving them.
Share the wealth
At Strange Loop, every employee receives salary and equity. We want employees to benefit if we do exit, but we don't want an exit to become the goal. Good companies focus on solving customer problems long-term, not optimizing revenue short-term.
To facilitate this, we share the profits we make with all our employees annually. Everyone receives an equal share. This means everyone benefits from the good work they do, and is incentivized to build a better company for the long-term.
Our Engineering Principles
These are a set of principles that guide how we build software at Strange Loop. You will see examples of these all throughout our codebase, and in the way we work with customers. We reserve the right to change them as we find better ways of working.
Always Be Learning
Software and customers are changing constantly, as technologies improve and markets change. Therefore, the only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn.
We continually discover better ways to leverage technology and serve customers. We also continually learn about how our customers work and the challenges they face, so that we can build them better solutions.
Build Quality In
We define a high-quality product as one that works the way customers expect it to and is easy to modify in the future. Adding quality in after a product has been released can be difficult: customers will be using it and finding bugs, which creates support load that steals time away from everything else. Therefore, we build quality in from the start, even if doing so means that a feature takes a little longer to build. The time is paid back quickly.
Always Be Shipping
When we’re building a product, we make a long list of assumptions about how we think customers will use it. Naturally, some of those assumptions are wrong, but we only find out which ones when our product is in the hands of real customers. We therefore try to ship small increments of a product sooner to customers, and seek their feedback as quickly as possible.
Make Incremental Improvements
Our products are never perfect. There is an infinite list of features we could add, and bugs we could fix, and latencies we could optimize to make them better. Unfortunately, though, we don’t have an infinite amount of time to do them all!
Occasionally we will schedule time to make a large improvement, but most of the time we focus on making small, incremental improvements as we go. These small improvements compound over time: each one makes the system easier to develop and operate, which frees up more time, which allows more improvements to be made.
Fail Better Next Time
We will fail sometimes. Our services will go down, or our accuracy will be poor, or our features will be too difficult to use. This is a natural part of product development. When it happens, no blame will be apportioned, because everyone involved was already trying to do their best. Instead, in these moments of failure, our focus is on what we can gain from it. We dissect what went wrong, possibly come up with some action items, but above all else learn.
Create Leverage
We deeply embed our engineers with customers, so that we can understand their problems inside and out. Unlike a consulting firm though, we have no intention of hiring thousands of engineers to scale. This means we find ways to create more with less. We do this by building levers into every system we touch so that we can move mountains.
Think About The System
The success of our company is the result of a large, interconnected, network of “things”. There are customers, and engineers, and a CEO, and a CTO, and services, and databases, and machine-learned models, and public clouds, and many more things.
All of these interact in unpredictable ways to create a complex system. When we’re doing our work, though, we only operate on one tiny part at a time. This makes it hard to see the forest for the trees. When making decisions, we do our best to think at the level of the system, and do things that will benefit it as a whole.