About Discovery & Scout
The Discovery team sits at the core of Harmonic’s product and data engine. We make it possible to search, research, analyze, compare, and evaluate across the entire universe of startups (we track tens of millions of companies, hundreds of millions of operators and, tens of thousands of investors along with their deal activity, and counting). We source and ingest data from first-, second- and third-party sources, including hundreds of fragmented and unstructured sources, and turn them into structured insights and searchable indices. Recently, we built the industry leading agentic layer for startup search and research, that’s unlocking new paradigms for VCs to make sense of this vast amount of data on startups and automate critical tasks in their sourcing and diligence workflows.
We’re in the middle of a massive platform shift where AI and LLMs are transforming what "software" is. Agentic product- and user-experience patterns will be spelled out in playbooks before long – and we’re building those playbooks, not waiting for them. This includes conversational interfaces, deep research, dynamic agentic frameworks purpose built for venture, and AI-first product workflows.
We’re looking for folks that want to help redefine software and push on this frontier with deep curiosity, an insatiable growth mindset, and high agency.
To learn more about the team:
The role
Architect the core intelligence behind Scout
Own the end to end architecture of our sourcing engine from data ingestion, ranking, personalization, and model orchestration.
Define scalable frameworks for retrieval, reranking, and LLM driven evaluation to ensure we deliver highly personalized and high quality results.
Create architectural patterns that integrate Scout seamlessly with our existing products to power repeatable sourcing workflows.
Lead agentic experimentation and evaluation
Drive technical discovery for emerging technologies (e.g. memory systems, schema, prompt libraries, embedding models, and agentic frameworks).
Improve and extend our evaluation pipelines to test new models and determine lifts in specific parts of our product.
Build systems that allow fast iteration without compromising quality or reliability. Our priorities are reliability, performance, cost, and then developer productivity.
Shape AI native product experiences
Partner with product and design to define patterns that make LLM powered sourcing intuitive and fast.
Translate ambiguous product goals into scalable technical designs that unblock new workflows for our users.
Establish best practices for building AI-first UX patterns (agentic flows, async interactions, structured outputs).
Provide architectural leadership across engineering
Mentor and guide engineers on the team raising the bar for system design, documentation, and technical decision making.
Drive clarity in cross team architecture with Flow, Data, and Infra ensuring Sourcing evolves as a cohesive, maintainable system.
Set long term technical direction for how we build AI powered sourcing systems.
Aldaron is the world's first transformation equity company.
We partner with great American businesses — especially founder-led companies outside the Fortune 500 — to apply frontier technology and drive lasting, growth-oriented transformation. We buy controlling stakes in these businesses and work shoulder-to-shoulder with their teams to build and deploy technology that creates step-change value.
We are not a software vendor. We don't sell subscriptions or install point solutions. We own the outcome together with our partners. This means our engineers aren't at the mercy of customer pacing or forced to shoehorn a product where it doesn't fit. We have perfect alignment: when our partners grow, we grow.
We are not private equity. We don't cut costs or cut jobs. We are growth-only. We help companies build the internal capability to absorb and apply not just today's frontier technology, but the next one — whether that's LLMs today, physical foundation models tomorrow, or whatever comes after.
Founded by the people who built Palantir Commercial. Our co-founder served as head of engineering for Palantir Commercial from its founding (5 people) through scaling to 600+ people, creating the commercial product and pioneering the Forward Deployed Engineering model. Our engineering team includes a 12-year Palantir veteran who was the engineering group lead for Palantir Ontology. This is the team you'd be learning from and building with.
Backed by institutional capital, not venture capital. Our first fund is $750M–$850M (approximately two-thirds raised). We never have to get very big — roughly 15–17 people total for the first 4–5 years, with about 8 engineers. Every hire matters enormously, and every person has outsized ownership and impact.
What makes us different:
Founding iOS Engineer
Senior Product Engineer
Staff Software Engineer, Frontend Infra
Forward Deployed Engineer
Founding Member of Technical Staff
Salary
$200,000 - $280,000
Location
New York, United States
Experience
8+ years
Total raised
$23.0M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
Bryan Casey
Co-founder
Max Ruderman
Co-founder
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.