Companies Hiring In This Issue:
Ornn · Taxwire · Golden Analytics
Brass Mole has been building quietly. Today, we open the door.
The best roles are filled before they’re posted.
A team decides to hire, taps its own network, and only opens the req publicly weeks later when that didn’t pan out. The listing you see is already the fallback.
Funding announcements are public.
Job boards are public.
Team pages are public.
Almost none of this is secret. It’s just scattered, and by the time a role surfaces where everyone looks, you’re three hundred deep in line.
So we do the digging for you. Every company here passes a six-point check:
Real, funded, and actively hiring
Tech stack quoted from the posting itself
Current team size
A verifiable named human, or an honest way in
Work setting: remote, hybrid, or in-office
Applicant saturation: is this role already crowded or is the door still open?
Whatever fails gets cut. About thirty reviewed; top three opportunities published.
Let’s dig in.
THE UNDERGROUND
Ornn
Seed, $33M, a16z crypto-led, 06/24/26
Five people in New York want GPU compute to trade like oil, and ICE, the NYSE’s parent, has already signed on to launch futures on their price index.
The Read: A loud lead with a small door: one engineering seat out of six open roles. Speed beats polish here.
Team: ~5, per Built In. The posting calls this hire “one of the first engineers.”
Hiring: 6 open roles, 1 engineering. In-office, New York.
Wayne Nelms, co-founder and CTO. The posting says you’ll work directly with the Head of Engineering. It names nobody, but on a five-person team that points to Nelms, the ex-SIG trader and ex-Google engineer who co-founded the company.
Stack: Python backend services and APIs, full-stack range; Rust a plus; trading or fintech latency work valued.
The Scoop: Straight talk: this raise was everywhere. a16z published its own memo, so your edge is the door, not the discovery. Write to [email protected] or the Gem board and reference OCPI’s Bloomberg Terminal listing, the detail that proves you understand what this team is actually building.
Taxwire
Seed + Series A, $25M, 06/30/26
Sales-tax compliance is the plumbing every SaaS company needs and nobody wants to build. Taxwire raised $25M at the end of June to own it, and just posted one remote senior engineering seat.
The Read: Fresh money, thin footprint: a real $25M round with no press swarm, and the rare senior role that’s fully remote.
Team: early, exact headcount not public. Backed by a just-closed $25M seed-plus-Series-A round.
Hiring: one senior engineering role, Backend Engineer (Senior/Staff). Remote, New York-anchored. Nine roles open company-wide.
Andrew Rea, co-founder and CEO. The posting says you’d work closely with the founders, engineers, and tax experts.
Stack: Python with FastAPI, Pydantic, pandas, and duckdb, on Postgres and SQL. Infrastructure runs on AWS.
The Scoop: Taxwire sells sales-tax automation, the unglamorous plumbing every SaaS company needs and nobody wants to build. It closed $25M across seed and Series A on June 30, and here’s the tell: no TechCrunch exclusive, no fund victory lap, just a quiet funding-database footprint. That’s the open door.
The role is a single senior backend seat, fully remote, on a team small enough that you’d work directly with the founders. Apply through the one Ashby form, not a referral maze, and lead with a real point of view on the compliance problem. The range is posted: $175K to $225K, plus equity.
Golden Analytics
Seed, $21M total, $14M Insight Partners-led extension, 06/09/26
Francois Ajenstat spent years running product at Tableau. Now he’s raised $21M to rebuild BI as AI-native, and posted his engineering roles where almost nobody looks.
The Read: Loud funding, quiet hiring door: three R&D engineering seats on a low-traffic company board, in person in Bellevue.
Team: 7 as of June, up from 4 at April launch. Engineers all Seattle-area.
Hiring: three R&D engineering roles, AI Engineer, Applied Scientist, and Full Stack Engineer. In person, Bellevue, WA.
Francois Ajenstat, Founder & CEO. Ex-Tableau Chief Product Officer; at 7 people, he’s the decision maker.
Stack: Vite, TypeScript, React, Postgres, and Supabase, plus LLMs, vector databases, and coding agents.
The Scoop: Golden is building AI-native BI, and this role runs end to end: the posting has you talking to customers, building, and shipping in the same day. You apply straight through the Rippling board, a standard application, so your first message is your differentiation. Comp shows only as competitive salary and equity, worth pinning down early, and at seven people the founder reads what comes through the door himself.
LAYOFF WATCH
The 2026 scoreboard is grim reading if you stop at the headlines:
Microsoft: 4,800 roles, July 6
Oracle: 21,000 over twelve months
Meta: 8,000 in May
Intuit: 3,000
Cisco: 4,000
Nearly every announcement name-checked AI while the company posted record revenue (per TechCrunch’s running list of 2026 tech layoffs).
But the headlines only report the door that closed. Two details from the same reporting tell the other half:
General Motors cut about 600 IT roles in May while actively recruiting for AI-native development, data engineering, and model development (TechCrunch, CNBC). IBM, mid-cuts itself, plans to triple US entry-level hiring this year — in its CHRO’s own words, “yes, it’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do” (TechCrunch, Bloomberg).
The pattern worth holding onto: the cuts are loud and AI-branded; the open seats sit on AI teams, and increasingly at companies too small to make a layoff tracker at all. All three companies above fit that description. That’s the side of the ledger this newsletter works.
BEFORE YOU GO
You’re reading Issue #0, which makes you one of the first people through the door. This first list is intentionally small. The checks are strict and it stays that way. If one of these three doors turns into a conversation, tell us: replies get read.
Full Access membership opens soon with dozens of timely listings instead of 3.
Founding readers will hear it first.
See you next issue.
—Your Brass Mole Team