Empirik

Why applying the normal way doesn't work

Empirik uses an ATS, but referrals still come first. Cold applications aren't ignored — they're just behind referrals, sourced candidates, and recruiter picks.

Who to contact at Empirik

Who decides

the hiring manager

Best channel

LinkedIn or direct email

What to show them

Take a real infrastructure repo — Terraform, Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests — and build something that reads a proposed change and outputs the downstream set it can affect, with a confidence score. Then do the part everyone skips: construct the cases where your model is confidently wrong. A change that looks isolated but shares a node pool, a config edit that alters a health check. Write up the false-negative modes, because a blast-radius model that misses things is worse than no model at all.

A cold email that works at Empirik

What Empirik screens for

Sequoia did not just write a cheque here, it incubated the company for three years inside its own IT organisation and then went out and recruited a CEO for it. That is a firm building a company rather than funding one, and it means the product was pressure-tested against a real environment before it ever had a customer. Canapi joining is the second tell: Canapi is a fintech and financial-institution specialist, and financial services is exactly where autonomous change approval is hardest to sell and most valuable once sold. For a candidate the edge is timing. Empirik has enterprise logos but is only now becoming a standalone company, so the entire engineering culture, the autonomy thresholds and the escalation model are still being written. Deciding where the traffic cop draws the line is the most consequential product judgment in the company, and it is being made this quarter.

Tailor your CV to the specific Empirik role rather than sending a general one. Applications that mirror the language of the job description clear automated filters at a materially higher rate.

Avoid

Don't make these mistakes

Do not pitch Empirik as observability. Kartik ran 30+ products including observability at Salesforce and was CPO at Quantum Metric, so he has heard every version of the dashboard pitch and the whole company is a bet against that framing. Avon spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware and then lived the outages at Sequoia; telling either of them that outages are expensive is telling them their own biography. Skip the anomaly-detection-with-ML angle too, which is the previous generation's answer. What works is showing you have thought about the hard part they named — deciding when a change is safe enough to execute without a human — and specifically about what happens when that decision is wrong.

Mistakes that kill Empirik applications

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  Don't send the same CV you sent everywhere else. At people it's obvious, and it's the fastest rejection there is.

• ✕

  Lead with their problem, not your ambition. Empirik is focused on Most production incidents originate in a change — show you understand that.

• ✕

  Don't apply and wait. The median AI application gets no response ever. One follow-up at day five roughly doubles reply rates.

We don't yet have verified candidate reports for Empirik. What follows is the typical process for a -person AI company, so treat it as a model, not confirmed detail.

Interview stages

1. 1

   Recruiter Screen

   Phone or video · 30 min

   What it testsBasic qualification and logistics
   Usually run byRecruiter or HR
2. 2

   Hiring Manager Interview

   Video call · 45 min

   What it testsRole fit and experience deep-dive
   Usually run byHiring manager
3. 3

   Technical/Functional Round

   Video call · 60 min

   What it testsSkills assessment and problem-solving
   Usually run byTeam members
4. 4

   Final Round

   In-person or video · 60 min

   What it testsCulture fit and cross-functional alignment
   Usually run bySenior leadership