Rinse careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Rinse has raised more than $70 million since 2013, per TechCrunch's April 2025 reporting. The first capital was a rolling friends and family round of roughly $500k to $600k, followed by seed funding in 2014 and 2015 (investors included ff Venture Capital, Great Oaks and Structure Capital), a 2016 Series A joined by Javelin Venture Partners and Base Ventures, a $14M Series B in June 2017 led by Partech Ventures, whose Nicolas El Baze joined the board, and a Series C in 2021. The most recent round is a $23M Series D announced February 20, 2025, led by LG Electronics, the appliance maker, which Rinse frames as fuel for its mission to "power laundry everywhere."

Rinse is a tech-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service: customers schedule a pickup in the app, W-2 employee Valets collect the clothes in the evening, local cleaning partners and Rinse's own facilities do the work, and everything comes back folded or pressed a few days later. Founded in San Francisco in 2013 by two Dartmouth classmates, it launched in three SF zip codes and now serves twelve metros across the US and Canada: the San Francisco Bay Area (including San Jose and Oakland), New York, Los Angeles, the D.C. area, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, Austin, New Jersey and Seattle. The company describes the model as combining smart scheduling with best-in-class quality on top of a strong technology backbone, in a $40 billion industry that had seen little software.

The operating ethos is "Make Mom Proud": delivery Valets are W-2 employees with paid sick time, mileage reimbursement and workers' compensation rather than gig contractors, the cleaning process avoids the carcinogenic solvent PERC, and the company collects clothing donations and reuses hangers. Engineering builds the systems that connect customers, cleaning partners, Valets and warehouse operators: customer web and mobile apps, mobile valet tools, routing and backend order processing.

Ajay Prakash, Co-founder and CEO. A Dartmouth graduate with prior startup experience who co-founded Rinse in 2013 and has led it from a bootstrapped start through its 2025 Series D. He has been candid about the early fundraising lessons, including wasting three months pitching Series A firms for a seed round before the friends and family route worked.

James Joun, Co-founder and COO. Grew up in the dry cleaning industry: his parents ran a family-owned dry cleaner in South San Francisco for more than 25 years, where he worked in the storefront. A Dartmouth classmate of Prakash, he saw declining traffic at his parents' store and the pair tested the Rinse concept within two weeks, getting paying customers immediately.

Sam Cheng, Co-founder and CTO. Co-founded Rinse in 2013 and leads the technology side of the business, per TechCrunch's 2025 profile of the company.

Engineering at Rinse has been fully remote for years, formalized well before most companies tried it, and the team describes a remote-first culture with offices available in San Francisco (HQ), Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, New York, New Jersey, Seattle, Austin and Toronto for anyone who wants a desk. The engineering postings are open about the appeal: bringing current technology to an under-served industry, where your systems handle real physical operations (pickups, cleaning, routing, deliveries) rather than moving pixels, and the economics of the business actually work.

This is a stable place by startup standards. The company is over a decade old, operates a service people rely on weekly, and closed new funding from LG Electronics in 2025 rather than winding down like many of its 2013-era delivery peers. Published benefits include stock options, medical, dental and vision coverage, an open vacation policy, flexible work and office hours, a 401(k) match, an annual offsite, and free laundry via Rinse credit.

The engineering job descriptions emphasize collaboration, honesty and open communication as the core of the team, shared ownership of systems through their full life cycle, and active participation in code review and recruiting. They look for people who bring depth in at least one core technology or domain (Django, Python, TypeScript, React, React Native, PostgreSQL, performance, geospatial, iOS, Android, UI/UX) to raise the team's aggregate skill set, and who thrive in ambiguity.

Rinse pitches a fast-moving environment where engineers are challenged and stretched daily, balanced against systems thinking: the postings talk about balancing quick iteration with long-term system health rather than pure speed. The wider company runs on operational discipline, with shift-based Valet logistics in twelve metros every evening.

As of October 2026 the engineering openings are Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer and QA Engineer, all fully remote or from any of the company's offices, plus a fully remote Customer Care Claims Associate. There is no hosted ATS board for engineering; roles are listed at https://www.rinse.com/careers/ and applications go by email to the address on each posting (the company asks for no recruiters). In its October 2026 Hacker News hiring post Rinse said it hires engineers anywhere in the US or Canada and is open to new grads this season.

Both software engineering postings share one published pay band, $80,000 to $200,000 USD, with final compensation based on experience, skills and market considerations. The breadth of the band reflects that the same posting covers multiple levels.