November 26, 2025
Six days, zero chill
Cekura (YC F24) Is Hiring
Six-Day Office Sparks Outrage as 'Do-It-All' Role Splits the Crowd
TLDR: YC-backed Cekura is hiring a hands-on customer engineer to make AI phone/chat bots more reliable, but its six-days-a-week in-office policy stole the show. Commenters clashed over whether the role is founder-track or glorified support and called out missing pay details—spotlighting startup culture tensions.
Cekura, a fresh Y Combinator startup (F24), is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer—think tech-savvy fixer who helps customers set up, measure success, and rescue messy integrations. They build tools that test and monitor AI phone and chat bots so they don’t freeze, talk over you, or ignore instructions. The post flexes 'fastest-growing' and 'years of runway,' then drops the kicker: in-person San Francisco, six days a week. Comments swarmed. Some cheered: finally a company shipping reliability, not just another demo. Others fired back: no pay range, massive scope, and a 'glorified support' role wearing a hero cape.
Biggest brawl? The six days in office line. One camp called it old-school grit; the other called it burnout cosplay. YC hype got roasted too—"fastest-growing… by what metric?" Meanwhile, engineers debated the gig: customer-facing builder versus ticket-taker. Acronyms like API (connecting apps) and CI/CD (automated software releases) triggered explainers; fans argued that being the bridge between customers and product is founder training. Memes flew: "they test barge-in… like your manager barging in on Saturday," and "simulate thousands of calls = my mom calling 1,000 times." Supporters dropped links to wins; skeptics begged for comp ranges. Verdict: high impact, high expectations, higher drama. The thread stayed spicy.
Key Points
- •Cekura (YC F24) is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to support technical customer success and integrations.
- •The role covers end-to-end onboarding, integration into CI/CD/production stacks, product feedback via RFCs, account health monitoring, issue triage, ROI storytelling, and team-building.
- •Minimum qualifications: 2 years in a technical role at a dev-focused or infra/SaaS company; comfort with APIs, webhooks, basic SQL, and Python or JavaScript.
- •Nice-to-have experience includes early FDE work and familiarity with LLM/AI agent tooling or observability/testing; the role is in-person in San Francisco, 6 days/week.
- •Cekura builds a reliability layer for conversational agents and automates testing/observability of AI voice agents using scenario simulations, datasets, workflows, personas, and real-time monitoring.