Why this grade
This listing scored 70/100, which is a B. It lost the most ground on pay transparency.
- Description depth 20 / 20 How much the posting actually says about the work, measured in characters of real text.
- Freshness 15 / 15 How recently it was posted. Older postings are likelier to be filled or abandoned.
- Remote clarity 15 / 15 Whether "remote" means anywhere, or is quietly restricted to one country.
- Pay transparency 12 / 25 A published salary range, worth more than any other single factor because it is what a candidate cannot find out without applying.
- Corroboration 5 / 10 Whether more than one source carries this listing.
- Role specificity 3 / 10 Whether the listing is tagged well enough to tell what the role actually is.
Every figure above is arithmetic over the posting itself — its salary field, its text, its age, its tags and how many sources carry it. How the grades work →
This listing does not state a salary
$130k – $188k
That is the middle half of what comparable roles paid on this board over the last 90 days — 51 listings that did publish a figure, median $161k. It is not this employer's offer, and we have no idea what they pay. It is only what the rest of the market advertised.
hn-hiring
Engineer| REMOTE (US Timezones) | Full-time | $170k to $230k Base + Equity + Health
Sidekick builds AI security software for enterprises. Our sensors observe AI behavior and use in situ. From those observations, our reasoning pipeline produces an application inventory and a risk picture, allowing us to provide real-time intervention and coaching right when it matters.
Compensation: base salary scaled to experience, meaningful early-stage equity, and 100% covered health insurance for you and your immediate family
We are a highly senior team. Most of us have been founders or on early founding teams, so we operate with high ownership. We expect you to have a real, current AI-assisted development practice. Our system spans several languages, and we expect you to use AI tools to quickly navigate unfamiliar parts of the codebase so you can comfortably own problems end-to-end across a broad stack.
We are hiring for three roles:
- Senior Software Engineer: You will work across our event-driven architecture. You'll write Go and Python backend services and touch endpoint-deployed browser and desktop components. You need to be comfortable developing in a multi-tenant, microservice-driven SaaS architecture and understand typical scale and security implications for such products.
- R&D Engineer: This is not an open-ended research function. You will take ambiguous feasibility questions tied to our roadmap and return defensible answers inside a week. You'll build handoff-ready prototypes, then shift into engineering mode to personally drive them through to production. You will also define operational envelopes and degradation boundaries, and rigorously deprecate infeasible ideas with documented rationale to avoid future re-litigation.
- Intelligence and Data Processing Engineer: This role is for someone who loves real browser and desktop forensics. You'll use dev tools and debuggers as your primary instruments. Expect to be reading minified code to find where state lives and analyzing network logs to understand undocumented APIs. You will figure out how AI products work and build the prototyping and automation to maintain our software inventory.
To apply:
Send an email to [email protected] with the role in the subject. Include a PDF of your resume, a quick sentence or two about a tough technical problem you've solved recently, and links to your GitHub, personal site, and/or LinkedIn.
I'm Eric, VP of Technology, and I will personally read every email sent to the HN subaddress. You can view my background here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/three-two-one
https://sidekicklabs.com
Apply for this role Opens linkedin.com — the link as listed; we have not yet verified it is the employer's own page
Quick question · anonymous · one tap
Would you apply to this job?
Answer to see what other job seekers said.
Keep looking
Similar remote roles, still open
-
C
8h ago
Senior Backend Engineer - Payments
Pleo Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, UK
- C 7h ago
- C 7h ago
- F 5h ago
Get new “SWE R D” roles by email
One email a day with what is new in "SWE R D". Nothing new, no email.
We confirm the address first, and every mail carries an unsubscribe link. Alerts are ours, not a third party's.
Your turn · no account needed
Help the next applicant
You may know something about this listing that we cannot see from here. One tap. No account needed. Signed-in reports earn points once the evidence agrees with you.
I know what it pays
Sign in with Google to earn points for reports — 100 confirmed points buy a week of Early Access.
Where this listing came from
- 01 Oct 2026 Hacker News first sighting
Seen on 1 board over 2 days.