Column (https://column.com/) | San Francisco, CA (ONSITE) | Full Time | Software Eng (Infrastructure), Software Eng (Backend), Software Eng (Product)
Column is building the infrastructure that powers the US dollar globally. We're a software first company, but also own a nationally chartered bank that we've built from the ground up. We're currently processing trillions of dollars annually (yes, that's with a T), supporting some of the largest and most sophisticated companies out there like Wise, Bilt, Brex, Ramp, Mercury and dozens of others.
Started by the founder of Plaid (plaid.com), Column is focused on keeping an extremely lean and experienced team: currently 10 engineers that all report to the CEO (many of whom we hired through HN). We are looking for an ambitious infrastructure, product, and backend engineer (one of each) that want to build incredible software from first principles.
Profitable and 100% owned by employees and founders.
I think my point in the post is: even though I may have graduated to writing more ambitious software (see: "managing a fleet of agentic coding agents"), and still find challenge in my work, it may be unreasonable to expect everyone to do that. This applies more to your typical salaried employee than solopreneur builder.
If you're a developer who's always been happy to build the next CRUD API endpoint and never felt frustrated at having to solve variants of the same problem over and over again, this new era is a pretty nasty shock.
I'm never sure how common that archetype is though.
Author here: I used Suno. I've played around with music production using things like Ableton and Logic Pro and I was completely blown away by Suno. It's really so much fun.
Column (https://column.com/) | San Francisco, CA (ONSITE) | Full Time | Software Eng (Infrastructure), Software Eng (Backend), Software Eng (Product)
Column is building the infrastructure that powers the US dollar globally. We're a software first company, but also own a nationally chartered bank that we've built from the ground up. We're currently processing trillions of dollars annually (yes, that's with a T), supporting some of the largest and most sophisticated companies out there like Wise, Bilt, Brex, Ramp, Mercury and dozens of others.
Started by the founder of Plaid (plaid.com), Column is focused on keeping an extremely lean and experienced team: currently 10 engineers that all report to the CEO (many of whom we hired through HN). We are looking for an ambitious infrastructure, product, and backend engineer (one of each) that want to build incredible software from first principles.
Profitable and 100% owned by employees and founders.
Column (https://column.com/) | San Francisco, CA (ONSITE) | Full Time | Software Eng (Infrastructure), Software Eng (Backend), Software Eng (Product)
Column is building the infrastructure that powers the US dollar globally. We're a software first company, but also own a nationally chartered bank that we've built from the ground up. We're currently processing trillions of dollars annually (yes, that's with a T), supporting some of the largest and most sophisticated companies out there like Wise, Bilt, Brex, Ramp, Mercury and dozens of others.
Started by the founder of Plaid (plaid.com), Column is focused on keeping an extremely lean and experienced team: currently 10 engineers that all report to the CEO. We are looking for an ambitious infrastructure, product, and backend engineer (one of each) that want to build incredible software from first principles.
Profitable and 100% owned by employees and founders.
Totally agree its a bit movie-plot-y, but the point of that example is to highlight something that (obviously) violates sanctions rules and would get flagged on a national security scale by governments.
The examples you listed would all be lower priority.
My belief is that people care more about things that affect them directly.
And this means your pro-control statements like "I pay a known enemy of state to fund a terrorist attack" are pretty abstract - do you know anyone who funds terrorists? Why would terrorists use US banks anyway, surely they use gold or drugs or something?
On the other side, your anti-control side ("I buy illegal drugs from a friend for personal use.", "I buy a ticket to a comedy show that makes fun of your government.") is much more relatable - I have friends who I know buy illegal drugs! I go to comedy shows! So despite stakes being much lower, the feelings are much stronger.
So if you want to get balanced view, it's important to keep local, relatable reasons for both sides. "30 emergency rooms were closed due to a ransomware cyber-attack, and government has no way to track the attackers" is a nice example of the locally relatable argument for "control" side. "Scammers stole all of the life savings from someone. Government has no way to get this money back" is another one.
How much prompt iteration did you do? I've noticed when building real world agentic apps that small prompt tweaks can make a huge difference in behavior (re: the reward hacking vs hallucinating). Would love to learn more about the approach here.
Hey, member of the benchmark team. We iterated on the prompts based on observed model behaviors. A few key examples:
Schema introspection: Models were spending significant tokens exploring the database structure through trial-and-error SQL queries, so we included the complete data model in the system prompt upfront.
Reward hacking: We added explicit instructions against gaming the reconciliation checks. This reduced the frequency initially, but models would eventually ignore these constraints.
Domain context: Including company background (YC-backed startup) substantially improved transaction categorization, particularly for startup-specific items like SAFE notes that require domain knowledge to classify correctly.
Column (https://column.com/) | Software Eng (Infrastructure), Software Eng (Backend), Software Eng (Product) | San Francisco, CA (ONSITE) | Full Time
Column is the first nationally chartered bank built from the ground up for developers. We provide an API first, modern banking experience for our customers, replacing the bloated middleware and legacy software that currently powers most financial companies.
Started by the co-founder of Plaid, Column has a team of 10 experienced engineers and is currently processing hundreds of billions in payments annually, supporting some of the largest and most sophisticated fintech companies. We are looking for ambitious infrastructure, product, and backend engineers that want to build the best-in-class banking tech from first principles. 2025 is lining up to be a huge year for us with lots of new features and high-scale customers, so it's an exciting time to join the team!
Column is building the infrastructure that powers the US dollar globally. We're a software first company, but also own a nationally chartered bank that we've built from the ground up. We're currently processing trillions of dollars annually (yes, that's with a T), supporting some of the largest and most sophisticated companies out there like Wise, Bilt, Brex, Ramp, Mercury and dozens of others.
Started by the founder of Plaid (plaid.com), Column is focused on keeping an extremely lean and experienced team: currently 10 engineers that all report to the CEO (many of whom we hired through HN). We are looking for an ambitious infrastructure, product, and backend engineer (one of each) that want to build incredible software from first principles.
Profitable and 100% owned by employees and founders.
Apply here: https://column.com/careers
Feel free to email me with any questions: praful@