How to Actually Get Hired
Who reads applications, which channel gets a reply, and what they screen for.
Don't make these mistakes
Don't pitch experience maintaining traditional dashboard-heavy observability stacks as your headline — the product's entire premise (spelled out in their public manifesto at sazabi.com/blog/manifesto) is that that world is over. And don't be vague about logs: the logs-first architecture is a deliberate, contrarian design choice (trading the classic three-pillars model for log-derived everything), and candidates who don't engage with that tradeoff haven't understood the product.
What gets their attention
Callaway's origin story is the credibility hook: he built infrastructure and observability at Brex and Crunchbase over a decade, and Sazabi came directly from grappling with the limits of best-in-class tools at Brex. His previous YC company, Opkit (phone call automation), was acquired. Their manifesto invokes The Bitter Lesson — 'logs are all you need' — and quoting that framing, or his line 'AI has changed how software gets written. Now it is changing how software gets operated,' shows you did the reading. Bonus: the platform is targeted at exactly the teams using Claude Code and Cursor, so being a heavy user of those tools is itself relevant context.
Why applying the normal way doesn't work
Sazabi is <50 people. No recruiter, no HR. Your application goes to a founder juggling everything. Cold outreach is how you actually get seen.
Who to contact at Sazabi
Founding team
Callaway is a two-time Y Combinator founder — his previous company, Opkit, a phone call automation platform, was acquired — and a software engineer with more than a decade in infrastructure, DevOps, and observability roles at VC-backed startups including Crunchbase and Brex, where he helped start the company's infrastructure and observability engineering teams. That Brex experience is the founding story: even with best-in-class tooling, incident response meant manually digging through data, and his instinct ('whenever there was a problem in production, I would reach for a log stream,' as he told Business Insider) became Sazabi's logs-first architecture. He took Sazabi through YC's Spring 2026 batch and assembled a team including early Brex infrastructure engineers and past observability founders. The classic pattern investors love and Hunter Walk named explicitly: a technical second-time founder solving a problem he personally lived.
What to show them
Built LLM agents that operate on large, messy real-world data — log analysis, root-cause investigation, code understanding, or automated PR generation. Their alpha stats (8,000 investigations → 2,000 detections → 200 PRs) imply hard problems in precision and noise reduction; showing you've built agents where false positives have a cost is the differentiator.
A cold email that works at Sazabi
What Sazabi screens for
Callaway's origin story is the credibility hook: he built infrastructure and observability at Brex and Crunchbase over a decade, and Sazabi came directly from grappling with the limits of best-in-class tools at Brex. His previous YC company, Opkit (phone call automation), was acquired. Their manifesto invokes The Bitter Lesson — 'logs are all you need' — and quoting that framing, or his line 'AI has changed how software gets written. Now it is changing how software gets operated,' shows you did the reading. Bonus: the platform is targeted at exactly the teams using Claude Code and Cursor, so being a heavy user of those tools is itself relevant context.
A tailored CV beats a generic one. Use Sazabi's job description language to clear filters.
Mistakes that kill applications
Generic CVs stand out at a <50-person company — and not in a good way. Fastest path to rejection.
Don't open with what you want. Open with what Sazabi is dealing with right now — The angel list is the signal: 60+ operators from Vercel, Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, and Replit are exactly the people who see where AI-era developer tooling is going, and they put money in, and what you'd do about it.
Applying and waiting = silence. Follow up at day five — it roughly doubles your odds of a reply.
Frequently asked questions
How do I apply to Sazabi?
Through the roles on our Sazabi jobs page, or directly to a founder or department head if you can reach them. At <50 people, direct outreach outperforms the form.
Does Sazabi respond to cold emails?
Response rate data for Sazabi not yet confirmed.
Who is the hiring manager at Sazabi?
At this size, hiring is usually run by a founder or department head.
What ATS does Sazabi use?
Sazabi uses Ashby.
How competitive is it to get hired at Sazabi?
Typical applicant count for B2B, Infrastructure roles (<50 people): 50-100 in two weeks. Apply fast.
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