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cbzehner

83 karma · joined June 10, 2014

Friendly neighborhood engineer. Currently @AtriumLTS, formerly @Facebook. Always @cbzehner | Twitter | Github | LinkedIn.
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cbzehner··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)
Fazeshift | Senior Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE (5 days/week) | Full-time | $200k–$235k + equity

I’m Chris, VP Engineering at Fazeshift. We’re nine engineers plus our Founder/CTO and me, and I’m hiring someone who can help us do more, better: increase both what we can build and the quality and sophistication of the software we build.

Accounts receivable sounds boring until you look under the hood. It sits at the intersection of money, business relationships, software systems of various vintages, and a huge amount of repetitive human work. Instead of giving finance teams another dashboard to stare at, we’re building AI agents that actually do the work across billing, collections, payments, cash application, and the systems connecting them. We’ve grown revenue 12x since 2024, and eight unicorns now run AR on Fazeshift.

A big part of what makes the engineering interesting is that we’re intentionally not the system of record. Our customers already run on ERPs, CRMs, banks, billing systems, payment processors, spreadsheets, and internal software, so we have to understand state across systems we don’t control, act safely in them, and recover when reality disagrees with what an API says should have happened. A timeout doesn’t necessarily mean a write failed. Webhooks can arrive late or twice. A payment may not contain enough information to identify an invoice. In those cases, blindly retrying can be exactly the wrong thing to do.

We use coding agents heavily ourselves. Engineers use Conductor, stacked PRs, Linear, and multiple frontier models every day, with internal skills and tooling that let agents drive and validate our local development environment. We’re especially interested in engineers whose development workflow has already materially changed because of coding agents: people who are comfortable delegating meaningful work, keeping independent threads moving in parallel, debugging where agents get stuck, and improving the surrounding system when the workflow breaks down. But generated code is still your code. Judgment, debugging, systems thinking, taste, and understanding what actually shipped matter more here, not less.

Our development style is roughly: design enough to find the shape of the problem, then build to learn. There’s a short distance here between noticing a problem, deciding what should happen, building it, and seeing the result in production with our customers. You’ll own meaningful problems from ambiguity through design, implementation, rollout, and production, and you’ll work directly with the people affected by what you build.

We’re looking for 5+ years of professional experience, strong TypeScript/full-stack skills, solid systems judgment, and real production ownership. No fintech background needed. Stack: TypeScript/Next.js, tRPC, Prisma/MySQL/PlanetScale, Inngest, AWS.

I read every HN application myself. Email chris.zehner@fazeshift.com with HN in the subject, your LinkedIn/GitHub/résumé, and a few sentences about something interesting you’ve built or improved recently.

cbzehner··on Perseus – NextJS alternative in Rust
I find Rust and Typescript have a lot of helpful surface similarities that make them an easy pair of languages to switch between.

The fundamentals are very different but it’s a case of convergent evolution - and I’m happy to liberally sprinkle clone’s around my rust code

cbzehner··on The fish shell is amazing
I used Fish for several years before switching over to nushell a few weeks ago.

Nushell takes the ideas behind Fish even further by incorporating types other than strings and adding more built-in functionality that’s useful for your average command-line user.

I doubt I’ll go back but both are great! Highly recommend Fish and Nushell!

cbzehner··on I spent 5 years writing my own operating system
Incredible!

What was the hardest part?

What did you learn that you weren’t expecting?

cbzehner··on A Better Fog-Trap
"What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators."

"Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programming binary loadlifters—very similar to your vaporators in most respects."

―Owen Lars and C-3PO

cbzehner··on Rust is a hard way to make a web API
Please do. This has been a consistent pain point in my Rust web dev experience and even seeing some examples of how others structure solutions really helps!
cbzehner··on So you've made a mistake and it's public
If this isn't an ironic commentary on current events...
cbzehner··on Why not use GraphQL?
200 OK { errors: “This way lies madness” }
cbzehner··on Anu: A sound, distributed version control systema
My understanding was that darcs fixed the model but had fundamental performance problems at _some scale_. I think pijul took the same concepts and tried to streamline them. And this rewrite does that...again?
cbzehner··on Ask HN: Newly Remote Workers – Where Are You Moving?
I moved back to Austin, Texas when this all started. Family, breakfast tacos and more living space were all factors.
cbzehner··on Ask HN: What kind of ideas are not VC-backable but should exist in the future?
You've just invented shipping containers.
cbzehner··on IETF: Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language
tl;dr

Suggested alternatives to the terminology master-slave:

Primary-secondary, Leader-follower, Active-standby, Primary-replica, Writer-reader, Coordinator-worker, Parent-helper

Suggested alternatives to the terminology whitelist-blacklist:

Blocklist-allowlist, Block-permit

cbzehner··on Hours
I worked at a company with an engineer who had a Perl script that prompted them to record what they were doing at random intervals through out the day.

When it came time for performance reviews, not only did it make for entertaining reading but it was easy to find all the small improvements they made that normally slip through the cracks.

cbzehner··on Ask HN: How to turn a “toy” side project into a business?
Thanks for sharing what you've been building. Very cool!
cbzehner··on How YC will be funding the S20 batch
> For maintaining eye contact during video call we need to look at camera rather than screen.

I solve this problem in most meetings by positioning the main view as a smaller window directly under my webcam. This helps put my focal point close to the speaker from their perspective.

cbzehner··on Legit: A CLI tool to make Git more accessible
Seems similar in aim to Gitless

[0] https://gitless.com/

cbzehner··on Tesla Cybertruck
Even if the target market fails, they’ve got a fallback. These things are going to be on Hollywood sci-fi sets for years to come!
cbzehner··on I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS
Just took a look at your landing page, cool idea -- one element of your service that really stood out was down at the bottom "Free concierge onboarding".

Really interesting offer. Do you find new subscribers take you up on this a lot? Seems like a great way to improve your migration tooling!

cbzehner··on Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
Although it's not a "codebase" per se, Architecture of OpenSource Applications is a great way to see how lots of major applications are structured. http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
cbzehner··on Modern text rendering with Linux: Part 1
What makes this approach "modern"? What is this approach the alternative to?

As someone broadly unfamiliar with text rendering it's not clear to me. An introduction to these points would be very helpful

cbzehner··on How we built a serverless architecture with AWS
I've been using Hasura for several months at work and it's approach to GraphQL has nailed the level of abstraction needed for early product development.

It's a great complement to serverless and static front-ends.

cbzehner··on Justin.tv's Live Video Broadcasting Architecture (2010)
Check out https://breakoutlist.com/, it's designed for answering just that question - with a bias towards Silicon Valley hype.

If you're interested in Atrium, reach out to me (see profile). We're hiring!

cbzehner··on Ask HN: In 2018/2019, is a bootcamp a good idea?
I have had a couple colleagues out of bootcamp programs, they all had previous careers and decided to make the leap into software.

If they're motivated and okay with the fact that they're mostly likely going to be offered an entry-level position for their first year in the field it can definitely work out for them.

cbzehner··on The Road to GraphQL
I haven't read this yet, but I plan on purchasing it and working through it this weekend or next. Robin's "Road to React" really helped me cement my understanding of React and learn how to use it in a concrete way. The focus on refactoring in his previous book has been immensely helpful in my day job.
cbzehner··on Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
Ex-Facebook. After five years I found my pace of learning had basically plateaued. Combine with organizational politics at any large company and I started looking for something smaller.

Ended up at Atrium, a legal startup in SF. Similar to mtlynch, I didn't expect how much I'd have to hone my front-end chops on leaving a FAANG.

Getting the opportunity to learn what I hadn't been learning and shore up those weaknesses reenforce my decision to switch.

Best parts so far:

* It's 30x smaller than FB was when I joined and 300x smaller than FB was when I left.

* Great people abound. I was worried that this wouldn't be the case at a smaller company but I joined partly on the basis of how intellectually curious the engineers I met were during my interview.

* It's a non-traditional tech company. We work with attorneys and build domain expertise in the problems CEOs and VCs face every day. The hard legal problems of starting a business.

If any of that sounds interesting, we're hiring! Reach out to username at gmail or https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings

cbzehner··on Ask HN: Getting to onsites, but consistently failing
Don’t forget, you only need one to land.

Remember someone is paying you for your time and skill right now! If you can let the rejections go, a hard thing, you’ll end up somewhere that’s a better fit.

I recently changed roles and it took a handful of onsites to catch my stride - more than six for sure! I only ended up with two offers but they were from my top two companies.

If you’d like feedback you’re welcome to reach out (username at gmail) and I’d also suggest doing a phone screen with Triplebyte, I was really surprised by how much constructive feedback they gave although that didn’t lead to my next job.

cbzehner··on Ask HN: Is the 1y cliff gone?
I think startups are behind BigCo on this. This is a recent change at places like Facebook.

I recently took a new job at a startup with a 1 year cliff and 10/20/30/40 vesting schedule, so there’s still a lot of variance in the market.

cbzehner··on Ask HN: How long does it take to learn a new keyboard layout?
I switched to Dvorak in a weekend (~8 hours) using something like https://learn.dvorak.nl/

It took me about a month to get comfortable and stop making mistakes and I switched back and forth regularly for the first two years (working in IT).

Now I mostly use Dvorak and when I switch it's not a problem but my typing speed in Qwerty is about a third slower.

Having done it, I'm happy with it but I probably would have learned Colemak instead because it's closer to Qwerty and would make those infrequent switches easier.

cbzehner··on How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown from 1 to 100 engineers
You should look at the articles from First Round Review[0]. I haven't read any in a while but they tend to be high quality long form write-ups from successful execs. Similar to this piece.

[0] http://firstround.com/review/

cbzehner··on Ask HN: How to become a remote contractor?
This isn't true. Very few people are bad across the board -- find your strengths (as other commenters have said) and focus on those.

It's better to be excellent in one or two areas, especially ones your passionate about than solid across the board. If you suck at something and it's causing problems, that's a different story -- but don't get stuck on comparing yourself to others.

I wish I could downvote this comment. Please ignore it.

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