Name: Builder Ben the Bug Smasher

Role: Software engineer at Series A startup

Age: 25

Education: BSc in Computer Science, MSc in Machine Learning

Location: lives in an urban Western city

Overview

Bio 🤳

Builder Ben is a software engineer / research engineer / evals specialist at a GenAI Series A startup. He worked in a dev role at a different company before and wanted to join a YC startup. He likes to build stuff and doesn’t like to talk too much. He spends most of his time writing code to build new features, debugging, and reviewing code.

Responsibilities 💼

• Developing new features (e.g. table feature to extract information)
• Reviewing code from team mates
• Scraping and cleaning data sources to add to his company’s database
• Evaluate new tools / services to use (e.g. an LLM observability platform)
• Read GenAI blogs, papers to stay at the bleeding edge

Pain points 📌

• Pressure to ship quickly while maintaining quality
• High expectations form managers on hours and speed
• Feeling FOMO with fast AI progress
• Arbitrariness, brittleness of prompt engineering and boredom of having to do this work