Looking for a Founding Engineer Role? Here's How I Built Matcha to Fix the Job Search

If you're searching for a founding engineer role at an early-stage startup, you've probably noticed how painful the process has become. The best jobs rarely make it to LinkedIn, AngelList (now WellFound) isn't what it used to be, and YC's Work at a Startup is limited to YC-backed companies.

I ran into this myself when I started looking for my next role after being engineer #2 at a fast-growing startup. I had equity, impact, and a strong team before. I wanted something similar again: a promising startup, fewer than 10 people, with founders who had a track record—and ideally, a meaningful equity stake.

But finding that? It was way harder than it should be.

Why Was Job Hunting So Frustrating?

Most job boards today optimize for volume, not quality. As a founding engineer, here's what I wanted to filter for:

  • Team size: ideally 2–10 people (basically, just the founders + first hires)
  • Equity: something in the 2–10% range, not just a token grant
  • Stage: early, promising, ambitious
  • Location: remote-first, but timezone-friendly (EU/EST)

The problem: no job platform gave me those filters across all jobs. WellFound wasn't pulling it off, YC's board was too narrow, and LinkedIn was just noise. To find what I wanted, I had to jump between multiple sources, scrape ATS pages manually, and still ended up missing hidden opportunities.

Job searching became demoralizing. Instead of being exciting, it felt like a second job.

So I Built Matcha

The frustration pushed me to build my own solution—something that worked the way I wished job boards worked. That's how Matcha was born.

Here's the approach:

  1. Aggregate everything

    I scrape jobs directly from ATSs, VC boards, and startup-heavy sources. Think roles like founding engineer, product engineer, frontend engineer, AI engineer.

  2. Enrich with company data

    Each job is tagged with info like company size, funding stage, and remote setup. (Believe it or not, no one else makes this easy to filter across job boards.)

  3. Filters that actually matter

    • Hard filters: "company under 10 people," "exclude Spain," "no Ruby on Rails."
    • Soft filters: things you can't easily check-box, like "AI/fintech with European founders." These get matched with semantic search against your profile and preferences.

  4. A zero-inbox experience

    Instead of scrolling the same listings endlessly, you only see what's new each day. If you like something, save it. If you don't, it disappears forever. The goal: a clean job search that feels energizing, not draining.

Why It Works Better

Matcha isn't another job board—it's closer to an AI job agent. It does the noisy legwork so you don't have to. For engineers like me (and my brother, who also used it when he was job hunting), that means:

  • You don't miss hidden startup opportunities.
  • You don't waste time on irrelevant roles.
  • You don't wrestle with clunky filter UIs—just describe what you want in plain English.

In short: Matcha makes job hunting feel like progress again.

Who Is Matcha For?

If you're a:

  • Founding engineer looking for your next equity-heavy role
  • Software engineer tired of noisy job boards and recruiters
  • Product engineer who wants to work closely with founders at early AI startups

…Matcha is designed with you in mind.

Final Thoughts

What started as a tool for my own job search has grown into something I'm opening up to others. If you're looking for a high-impact startup role—something with ownership, equity, and founders you actually want to work with—give Matcha a try.

Job searching shouldn't be about endless scrolling and frustration. It should be about quickly spotting the opportunities that truly matter.


If you're job hunting — good luck.
Try it out or reach out to me directly fico@matcha.fm
— Fico