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How to Actually Get Hired
Who reads applications, which channel gets a reply, and what they screen for.
Don't make these mistakes
Applying to Moda with a design portfolio that doesn't show product thinking. Anvisha is an engineer and PM first. Ravi has spent a decade building SaaS infrastructure. John built infrastructure at two exits. This is a technical founding team building a design product. They are not looking for designers who love AI tools. They are looking for builders who understand that taste is a technical problem. Lead with what you've built and what architectural decisions you made, not with your Figma skills.
What gets their attention
The Dover careers page is live with four roles, all stamped "founding" or early-stage seniority. Crucially, these roles went up on March 24, 2026, the same day as the public launch and the funding announcement, they are days old. Anvisha has framed the hiring explicitly as "assembling a world-class founding team." The Founding AI/ML Engineer role is in-office New York, which signals that the core model and agent work is being done in the room with the founders. The Founding Engineer is hybrid between NYC and SF, which is the widest geographic flexibility on offer. The Chief of Staff role is notable: at a company this size, this person sits directly next to the CEO and is likely doing everything from investor reporting to product strategy to hiring coordination. General Catalyst's standard post-seed playbook pushes portfolio companies toward rapid team build and aggressive GTM within six months of the raise. With 3,000 beta users and paying customers already, the pressure is on.
Why applying the normal way doesn't work
With only <50 employees, MODA doesn't have dedicated recruiters. Founders review applications between running the company. The challenge isn't competition — it's visibility. Direct outreach wins.
Who to contact at MODA
Founding team
Anvisha grew up in Mumbai and moved to the US alone at 17 to study at MIT, where she majored in Computer Science with a minor in mathematics, was a teaching assistant for 6.006 Introduction to Algorithms (one of MIT's most demanding CS courses), and did undergraduate research at CSAIL, MIT's flagship AI and computer science lab. Her career trajectory reads as unusually coherent for a founder of her age: she was an engineer at Rep (backed by Accel, First Round, and Forerunner), co-founded Slab Inc. (a knowledge-sharing platform), interned at Google and Affirm, and worked as a product manager at Dropbox before its IPO. She then co-founded Dover, the AI recruiting platform, which raised $23M from YC, Founders Fund, and Tiger Global and was valued at $300M. Dover is notable for a specific reason here: it built the careers portal that Moda's own hiring page runs on. Anvisha has talked publicly about her motivation for Moda in unusually personal terms: she described the launch as something she wanted to build that her parents could use, and framed her immigration and MIT journey as the context for why democratising taste and design matters to her. On X, she announced the launch with "We raised $7.5M to kill AI slop." Her handle is @anvisha.
Ravi studied CS at Stanford for a BS and MS, but what's less commonly surfaced is that before committing fully to software, he spent a period as a semi-professional musician. That detour is relevant: it suggests someone who arrived at technical building deliberately, not by default, and who has a non-standard relationship with creativity that maps well to what Moda is building. He co-founded Heap in 2013 with his Stanford friend Matin Movassate, scaling it to a $960M valuation before it was acquired by Contentsquare. He has written publicly and at length about the difference between finding product-market fit the first time versus the second, and about how the challenges of scaling a company shift from zero-to-one to operational coordination. Airplane, his second company, was co-founded with Joshua Ma and acquired by Airtable. His first Airplane customer, by his own admission, was Anvisha Pai's startup Dover, which is the origin story of this founding team. He writes regularly on LinkedIn about SaaS, product, and founder lessons.
John was employee number one at Dover, which means he built the technical infrastructure of Anvisha's last company from the ground up. Before Dover he scaled infrastructure at Expanse, the cybersecurity startup that was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. He has the lowest public presence of the three founders and does not appear to have a prominent X or writing presence, which makes LinkedIn the primary outreach channel. The fact that he followed Anvisha from Dover to Moda as a co-founder rather than an employee is a strong signal about the quality of the working relationship and his belief in the thesis.
What to show them
This is a founding-level operator role. At Moda's current size, the Chief of Staff is working directly with Anvisha on everything from partnerships and investor relations to hiring pipeline to product prioritisation. It requires someone who can hold multiple contexts simultaneously, move fast without losing quality, and thrive in ambiguity without becoming a bottleneck. Core skills: startup operations, executive communication, project management across functions, hiring support, strategic writing, stakeholder management, comfort with ambiguity. Proof of work: Write a one-page "week one" operating memo for a Chief of Staff joining a 10-person AI design startup that just publicly launched: what are the three highest-leverage things you'd tackle in the first week, what decisions would you be making without being asked, and what would you hold back on? Share this with the application or use it to start the conversation.
A cold email that works at MODA
What MODA screens for
Their focus: The Dover careers page is live with four roles, all stamped "founding" or early-stage seniority. Crucially, these roles went up on March 24, 2026, the same day as the public launch and the funding announcement, they are days old. Anvisha has framed the hiring explicitly as "assembling a world-class founding team." The Founding AI/ML Engineer role is in-office New York, which signals that the core model and agent work is being done in the room with the founders. The Founding Engineer is hybrid between NYC and SF, which is the widest geographic flexibility on offer. The Chief of Staff role is notable: at a company this size, this person sits directly next to the CEO and is likely doing everything from investor reporting to product strategy to hiring coordination. General Catalyst's standard post-seed playbook pushes portfolio companies toward rapid team build and aggressive GTM within six months of the raise. With 3,000 beta users and paying customers already, the pressure is on.
Tailor your CV to the specific MODA role rather than sending a general one. Applications that mirror the language of the job description clear automated filters at a materially higher rate.
Mistakes that kill applications
Don't send the same CV you sent everywhere else. At <50 people it's obvious, and it's the fastest rejection there is.
Nobody cares what you want. Start with AI content generation is commoditised and how you'd help.
Most B2B, Infrastructure applications get ghosted. A day-five follow-up can double your response rate.
Frequently asked questions
How do I apply to MODA?
Through the roles on our MODA jobs page, or directly to a founder or department head if you can reach them. At <50 people, direct outreach outperforms the form.
Does MODA respond to cold emails?
We haven't verified response rates at MODA yet.
Who is the hiring manager at MODA?
At this size, hiring is usually run by a founder or department head.
What ATS does MODA use?
MODA uses Workable.
How competitive is it to get hired at MODA?
Roles at <50-person B2B, Infrastructure companies typically draw 50-100 applicants in the first two weeks. Applying inside 72 hours of a posting going live is the single biggest lever you control.
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