Exceptional Engineer
Fonzi Match Day is where product engineers who ship meet the startups worth shipping for. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront.
About Match Day
Every week, hiring managers at 100+ pre-vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They're reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you've built, how you think about users, and whether you're the kind of engineer who owns products end-to-end. Companies on Fonzi are building AI-native products, modern SaaS platforms, and consumer apps that are growing fast. They're backed by investors like a16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more.
How It Works
- 2-minute application
- We reach out, learn what you're building and what excites you, and optimize your profile
- Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want
- Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you
- You only interview where you're genuinely interested
- Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime with questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination
Who We're Looking For
The engineers who do best on Fonzi:
- Have shipped user-facing products end-to-end — from scoping the feature to getting it in front of real users and iterating on feedback
- Think like a product owner, not just an implementer. You have opinions about what to build, not just how
- Are strong full-stack generalists who can move between frontend, backend, and infrastructure without waiting for someone else
- Thrive at early-stage companies where ambiguity is the norm and the team is small enough that your decisions matter immediately
- Have 2-8 years of experience, ideally with time at a high-growth startup where you wore multiple hats
What matters to the companies on Fonzi:
- You're fluent across the modern stack: TypeScript, React/Next.js, Python or Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS/GCP
- You build interfaces people actually want to use — you care about UX, not just functionality
- You can take a half-formed idea from a founder or a Slack message and turn it into a shipped feature
- You've integrated AI/LLM capabilities into real products — not as the ML researcher, but as the engineer who makes it work for users
- You own projects from database schema to deploy, and you talk directly to customers
- Bonus: experience with API design, real-time systems, Cursor/AI-assisted development workflows, or building in regulated industries (healthcare, fintech, legal)
What You'll Build
The companies on Fonzi are working on:
- AI-native products where the intelligence layer is the core experience, not a bolt-on feature
- Internal tools and dashboards that turn complex data into decisions for operators, executives, and domain experts
- Consumer and prosumer applications scaling to millions of users
- Workflow automation platforms that replace manual processes across healthcare, legal, fintech, logistics, and compliance
- 0-to-1 products where you're the first or second engineer and your architecture decisions define the company
- Enterprise-ready platforms expanding from MVP to multi-tenant, production-grade systems
Pay
$150,000 – $300,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies.
The Interview Process
Most Fonzi companies run a lean, respectful process:
- Screening conversation: product sense, communication skills, cultural fit for startups
- Technical deep-dive or pairing session: can you build across the stack and make good tradeoffs
- Product/architecture discussion: how you think about what to build and why