---
title: 'Founding Engineer at propolis.tech'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-propolis-tech-new-york-xehmezg3bdd2'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Founding Engineer at propolis.tech

- **Company:** propolis.tech
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-07-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/propolis-tech/am9icG9zdDozqxnxnB6lFVqRw0uFx2Pl

## Job description

## About the Role

Propolis is looking for it’s Founding Engineer, who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast. You'll help build our product from the ground up, making critical technical and product decisions that shape our company's future. This isn't a role for someone who needs detailed specs, you'll be making decisions with us on the fly.

## What You'll Do

- Ship fast, iterate faster. Build and deploy features daily, not monthly
- Make product decisions alongside technical ones - you'll be in the trenches with us, talking to users and determining roadmap priorities
- Develop AI-first features, experimenting with the latest and greatest in LLMs

## What We're Looking For

- First and foremost, drive and an autonomous mindset
- Proven track record of shipping products quickly in startup environments
- AI/ML experience with LLMs, embeddings, or other AI technologies
- Full-stack capabilities across frontend, backend, and infrastructure
- Product intuition and willingness to engage with users directly
- Experimental mindset comfortable with trying novel approaches and learning from failures

Ideal Background

- There isn't one! We care more about the above ^
- Experience with AI development
- Track record of 0-to-1 product development
- Comfortable with ambiguous requirements and changing priorities

## What We Offer

- Significant equity stake in a high-growth company
- Competitive salary
- Direct impact on product direction and technical architecture
- Work directly with founders and key stakeholders

## About Propolis

Propolis simulates users via swarms of autonomous browser agents that test for you. Automate away your entire QA function.

## About propolis.tech

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Propolis provides an autonomous QA testing platform that uses swarms of intelligent browser agents to simulate real users and automatically test software applications.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Acquired by Datadog in January 2026)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Marc Papazian (CEO/Co-Founder) and Matt White (CTO/Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Technology, Information and Internet; AI-powered Software Testing & Quality Assurance
- Target customers: B2B, software engineering teams at startups and enterprises looking to accelerate release cycles and eliminate manual QA bottlenecks
- Mission or purpose statement: To eliminate QA bottlenecks by deploying autonomous browser agents that think and behave like real users, enabling teams to ship faster with confidence.

## Products & Services
- **[Propolis Autonomous QA Platform]**: An AI-powered SaaS platform that deploys swarms of synthetic users (browser agents) to explore an application, discover all user flows, and automatically generate and maintain test coverage. It produces detailed bug reports with videos, traces, and reproduction steps, delivered directly to Slack, Linear, or GitHub. The platform is designed to handle complex, nondeterministic, and agentic user journeys, and it self-heals tests to keep coverage up to date.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (acquired by Datadog, a public company with a market cap of ~$40B+ as of early 2026)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $500,000 (Pre-Seed round led by Y Combinator in July 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (lead investor in Pre-Seed round); acquired by Datadog
- **Growth Signals**: Acquired by Datadog in January 2026, just months after founding and shortly after graduating from Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch. The acquisition was driven by the strategic need to integrate AI-driven pre-production testing with Datadog's deep production observability (traces, logs, RUM). The company grew headcount 100% YoY (from 2 to 3 employees) prior to acquisition.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Autonomous, Self-Healing Tests**: Unlike traditional brittle automation, Propolis's agents understand the application's structure and automatically adapt to changes, eliminating the need for human test maintenance.
- **Goal-Oriented Testing**: The platform tests for successful user outcomes, not just scripted steps, making it uniquely suited for testing AI outputs and complex, dynamic user journeys.
- **Deep Integration with Datadog**: Post-acquisition, the platform is being combined with Datadog's production context (traces, logs, RUM) to create a closed-loop system where agents infer user intent from real-world usage data, shifting quality from a pre-release gate to a continuous signal in CI/CD and runtime.

## Strategic Focus
- **Post-Acquisition Integration**: The immediate priority is integrating Propolis's technology with Datadog's existing observability platform to create an end-to-end automated testing solution.
- **Scaling the Platform**: Leveraging Datadog's infrastructure and customer base to scale Propolis's agent-based testing to thousands of enterprise customers.
- **Continuous Quality**: Shifting the paradigm from testing as a pre-release phase to a continuous, embedded signal within CI/CD pipelines and runtime environments.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact, Fast-Paced Environment**: As a recently acquired YC startup, the team operates with a startup ethos—shipping fast, making product decisions on the fly, and having direct impact on the product and technical architecture.
- **Cutting-Edge AI Work**: Engineers work on the latest LLMs, embeddings, and AI-first features, building autonomous agents that are at the forefront of the AI testing space.
- **Work with Founders**: The role offers direct collaboration with the founders (Marc Papazian and Matt White), who have deep experience from Palantir and Airtable.
- **Location**: Based in New York, NY (HQ). The pre-acquisition job posting was for an in-office or hybrid role in NYC.
- **Compensation & Equity**: Pre-acquisition, the founding engineer role offered a salary of $130k - $200k with significant equity. Post-acquisition, compensation and equity packages would be through Datadog, which is known for competitive total rewards.
- **Engineering Culture**: Described as a place for those who "thrive in ambiguity and move fast," with an experimental mindset and a focus on 0-to-1 product development.

## Sources
1. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/propolis-ai)
2. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/propolis)
3. [datadoghq.com](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-propolis/)
4. [bloomberg.com](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/2637248D:US)
5. [weekday.works](https://jobs.weekday.works/propolis-(x25)-founding-engineer)

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