Hazel (YC W24) Is Hiring

$150K - $200K USD | 0.25% - 0.5% Company Equity

This is Hazel’s first engagement in a new customer portfolio. We are one of the very first startups to ever win work with this customer. You will lead this product deployment. If you are interested in a career in national security, we will sponsor your Top Secret clearance for this role.

As a Hazel engineer, you’ll architect and deploy secure, scalable systems that bring AI to government procurement. You’ll own features end-to-end, from backend services and data pipelines to model integration and front-end delivery, helping our partners move faster and smarter. Hazel combines startup speed with the mission focus of public service.

You’ll work side-by-side with inquisitive and driven founders as well as a world-class and dynamic founding engineering team. Hazel continuously promotes learning and provides numerous resources from our founders, other startups, and VCs – as well as frontline exposure to customer executives and multiple engineering skillsets.

Hazel is a mission-driven organization founded by engineers and built around delivering world-class innovation to our government partners. We strive for excellence, deliver impact, and have fun doing it.

You care about mission. Hazel partners with agencies supporting everything from public school teachers in the classroom to warfighters in the field. We believe in products which change America for the better.

You want a startup that is structured without being rigid, quality-obsessed without being slow, and product-led without losing the vision. You take ownership: shaping the roadmap, talking to customers, and wearing many hats. We build exceptional generalists.

You solve problems. There’s no more time to opine on strategy and policy when our nation faces existential challenges, today. We are workhorses, not showhorses.

You are always learning. Nobody has all the answers, and the world is ever-evolving, so we must be adaptive. We bring the best practices available from all domains to meet the challenge.

You believe in team. Our team grows together, supports one another, and elevates our shared successes. We are more effective together.

Hazel is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status, age, or any other federally protected class.

Hazel’s name is inspired by Hazel Ying Lee, one of the first Chinese-American women to serve in the U.S. military as a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II. All Americans can break barriers, dare to innovate, and be the change.

Our mission at Hazel is simple and powerful. We use AI to help U.S. government purchasing teams buy at the speed of need with unparalleled efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It is a $2.7T problem every single year, and Hazel is at the forefront with State, Local, and EDucation (SLED) and federal government agencies.

Government procurement has moved at a glacial pace for decades, stovepiped by complex processes, regulatory capture, and overworked civil servants. The impacts are severe. Our founders saw at Palantir and BCG how lowly procurement challenges fueled wildfires across California, compromised critical U.S. national security systems, and wasted billions of dollars.

Hazel has identified a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve this by deploying cutting-edge AI to the public sector and unlocking the full potential of our nation. We empower our partners to move with expediency against the most pressing challenges of this century including climate sustainability, great power competition, and more. Hazel builds AI for the public interest. The founders August and Elton saw this problem firsthand at Palantir and BCG, and they have enlisted a deep bench of investors from both tech and government to deploy one of the first real commercial applications of generative AI in the public sector.