What we look for when we hire

Let's dive deep:

Relay is a small team. Six people, each carrying real weight. When we hire, we're not filling a role on an org chart. We're adding someone who'll shape the direction of the product and the company.

We don't care much about pedigree. We've never filtered by school name or company logo. What we look for is evidence of ownership — people who've taken something from zero to one, whether that's a side project, an open-source tool, a community, or a process improvement at a previous job that nobody asked them to do.

"I applied expecting a typical startup interview loop. Instead they gave me a real problem, watched me think through it, and made an offer that afternoon." — Marcus Lindgren, Infrastructure Architect at Relay

We look for clarity of thought. Can you explain a complex idea simply? Can you write a clear document? Can you make a decision with incomplete information and own the outcome?

And we look for taste. Not in a subjective, hand-wavy way — but in the sense of knowing what good looks like. Good code. Good design. Good communication. People who notice when something is slightly off and care enough to fix it.

We work asynchronously, mostly. We write more than we meet. We ship fast and iterate faster. If that sounds like your kind of environment, check our open positions. If not, no hard feelings — we'd rather be honest about how we work than sell a version of it that doesn't hold up.