December 25, 2025
Focus or phocus?
Clearspace (YC W23) Is Hiring a Founding Network Engineer (VPN and Proxy)
Anti-doomscrolling startup wants a VPN wizard — fans swoon, privacy hawks hiss
TLDR: Clearspace is hiring a founding network engineer to build a VPN-powered, rule-based filter that helps people stop doomscrolling. The community is split between excitement for an “attention firewall” and alarm over privacy, trust, onsite-only hiring, and a lofty founding title—raising the question: can restraint be built on surveillance
Clearspace, a YC-backed “save-your-attention” app, just posted a role for a founding network engineer to build a global VPN and smart proxy that can obey plain-English rules like “block TikTok after 10pm.” And the internet promptly turned into a town hall. To believers, this is Adblock for your brain—finally, tech that fights back against the infinite scroll. One commenter cheered, “If my phone listened when I say ‘no Instagram at bedtime,’ I’d sleep like a baby.” Skeptics, however, heard something spicier: a startup asking to see and steer all your traffic. Cue the privacy sirens. “We’re protecting your attention,” said Clearspace; “You’re inspecting my life,” snapped the comments. The job’s “founding engineer” title with 3+ years experience lit another fuse—some call it a rocket-ship opportunity, others call it title inflation. The onsite in San Francisco note split the crowd too: one camp says serious infra needs in-person war rooms; the remote die-hards yelled “No VPN can tunnel through rent.” Meanwhile, the meme factory went wild: “Net Nanny for grown-ups,” “Self-Control as a Service,” and “I, for one, welcome our packet overlords.” Love it or loathe it, the hottest debate is simple: Can you trust a focus tool that needs to see your internet to help you stop using it
Key Points
- •Clearspace is hiring a founding Network Engineer to own its VPN and policy-aware proxy for an AI agent.
- •The role focuses on building a global VPN, real-time policy application to traffic, and privacy-respecting traffic classification.
- •Responsibilities include region-aware routing and connection strategies to maintain speed and stability as users move.
- •Qualifications: 3+ years in high-throughput networking/edge systems, strong debugging across the network stack, systems fundamentals, and proficiency in Go (TypeScript a plus).
- •Preferred experience: VPN/tunneling (IPsec/IKEv2, WireGuard, StrongSwan, OpenVPN), proxies/L7 gateways, traffic analysis/DPI, mobile networking constraints, and eBPF; onsite in San Francisco.