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Empirik
Predicts the blast radius of an infrastructure change before it ships
Last verified September 2, 2026 · Updated daily
What Empirik is building
Empirik inverts the observability model. Observability tools help you understand what went wrong after a system fails. Empirik models the likely effects of a change before it is deployed, and intervenes upstream. Kartik Chandrayana describes the mechanism precisely: "We do this by capturing intent, computing blast radius, and safely evaluating whether a change can execute autonomously or needs human review." Those three steps are the product. Intent is what the change is trying to accomplish, which is not recoverable from the diff alone. Blast radius is the inferred set of downstream systems the change can touch across an environment that spans public clouds, on-prem and SaaS. The evaluation step is where it becomes autonomous rather than advisory: Empirik acts as a traffic cop, waving through low-risk updates, putting guardrails around larger ones, and escalating the genuinely dangerous ones to a human. The company's own stated ambition is the useful frame. "What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering." Cursor and Claude Code made writing code a supervised-autonomy problem rather than a typing problem. Empirik is arguing that changing infrastructure should work the same way, and that the missing piece was never a better dashboard — it was a model of consequence. The origin story matters to the product. Avon Puri ran infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware for over a decade before becoming Sequoia's chief digital and information officer, and he built this with Sudheer Dhurjati, another Sequoia IT leader, out of the outages they were living with themselves.
Why this matters
Most production incidents originate in a change. That has been the operating folklore of SRE for a decade, and the entire observability market — a market with several public companies in it — is built downstream of that moment, selling you faster answers about a failure that already happened. Empirik's claim is that the same AI capability that made agentic coding work makes the upstream intervention finally tractable, because you can now model intent and consequence rather than just correlate metrics. The evidence that this is more than a feature is the customer list at launch. S&P Global, Guardant Health and multiple Fortune 500 companies do not deploy a pre-launch startup into change management on a whim; that is an environment where a wrong autonomous approval is a compliance event. Sequoia incubating it internally for three years and then recruiting an outside CEO to run it is a firm treating this as a platform bet rather than an experiment, and investors are explicitly betting that predictive change intelligence becomes a durable category rather than another checkbox inside an existing observability suite.
Open roles at Empirik
4 positions we're tracking. Roles are re-checked daily and removed when filled.
Infrastructure AI Engineer (intent capture and blast-radius modelling)
First seen today
Platform Engineer (connectors across public cloud, on-prem and SaaS)
First seen today
Enterprise Solutions Architect (Fortune 500 change-management deployments)
First seen today
Founding Product Designer (autonomy and escalation UX)
First seen today
Know when Empirik is hiring before anyone else
A role stays uncontested for about four days. Here's the window — and where we put you in it.
From $9/month, cancel any time.
Watching Empirik
0 applicantsRole spotted & verified
1You get the alert
1You've applied
~8Hits the job boards
250+Hiring outlook
A company spinning out of its incubator with $21M and named Fortune 500 deployments is by definition in build-the-team mode, and Kartik has been publicly signalling hiring on his own profile while running the launch. The customer base spanning public cloud, on-prem and SaaS forces breadth in engineering and a real solutions function. Scored 7 rather than 8 because there is no public careers page or list of open reqs yet.
Working at Empirik
Empirik is Predicts the blast radius of an infrastructure change before it ships, founded in and now people. At this stage, expect opportunity to shape your role based on the company stage.
Bay Area, USA is where most Empirik positions are located.
How to actually get hired at 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
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.
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
Don't send the same CV you sent everywhere else. At people it's obvious, and it's the fastest rejection there is.
Nobody cares what you want. Start with Most production incidents originate in a change and how you'd help.
Most AI applications get ghosted. A day-five follow-up can double your response rate.
Applying to Empirik? Get the contact, not the form.
The Empirik interview process
4 stages · 14 days typical · take-home: yes · modelled from similar companies
We don't yet have verified candidate reports for Empirik. What follows is the typical process for a -person AI company — treat it as a model, not confirmed detail.
Interview stages
Recruiter Screen
Phone or video · 30 min
Basic qualification and logistics
Recruiter or HR
Hiring Manager Interview
Video call · 45 min
Role fit and experience deep-dive
Hiring manager
Technical/Functional Round
Video call · 60 min
Skills assessment and problem-solving
Team members
Final Round
In-person or video · 60 min
Culture fit and cross-functional alignment
Senior leadership
Empirik take-home assignment
Empirik includes a take-home exercise in their interview process. For AI roles, this typically involves a practical problem that takes 2-4 hours. Focus on clean, working code over premature optimization. They're evaluating how you think and communicate, not just the solution.
Empirik interview timeline
Empirik runs about days from first contact to offer. The median for AI companies at people is 14 days, so Empirik is about average than most.
Interviewed at Empirik?
Tell us how it went — stages, questions, timeline. Takes 90 seconds and it's how this page stays accurate for the next person.
Submit your Empirik interview experience →Empirik jobs, frequently asked questions
How many jobs does Empirik have open?
We're tracking 4 active openings at Empirik (verified September 2026).
Does Empirik hire remotely?
Currently, Empirik only has in-office roles in Bay Area, USA.
What roles is Empirik hiring for?
Empirik is hiring across Engineering, Other, Design. The most recent opening is Infrastructure AI Engineer (intent capture and blast-radius modelling).
How do I apply for a job at Empirik?
Click through to apply, or see our detailed guide on landing a job at Empirik.
Does Empirik respond to cold emails?
We haven't verified response rates at Empirik yet.
Who is the hiring manager at Empirik?
At this size, hiring is usually run by the hiring manager.
How competitive is it to get hired at Empirik?
Roles at -person AI companies typically draw 100-250 applicants in the first two weeks. Applying inside 72 hours of a posting going live is the single biggest lever you control.
How many rounds is the Empirik interview?
4 stages: Recruiter Screen, Hiring Manager Interview, Technical/Functional Round, Final Round.
Is the Empirik interview hard?
The interview emphasizes technical depth and system design over abstract problems. Hardest stage: Technical Interview.
Does Empirik give a take-home task?
Yes, Empirik includes a take-home assignment.
How long does Empirik take to get back to you?
Around 14 days across the full process.
What should I prepare for the Empirik interview?
Prepare for technical depth and system design. A -person startup wants proof you can ship, not that you can whiteboard.
Where is Empirik based?
Empirik is headquartered in Bay Area, USA.
Get Empirik roles before they're posted
A role stays uncontested for about four days. Here's the window — and where we put you in it.
From $9/month, cancel any time.
Watching Empirik
0 applicantsRole spotted & verified
1You get the alert
1You've applied
~8Hits the job boards
250+