The YC Founding Engineer Playbook | Tusk (YC W24) Founding Engineer Interview

Welcome to the 4th episode of the Hustling Unicorns with Harshith podcast. We're on a mission to interview founders, VCs, investors, operators, and others in the startup space to enable everyone in the world to build their own rocketship! What does it really take to be a Founding Engineer at an early-stage startup? 🚀 In this episode, we sit down with Sohan Kshirsagar, a Founding Engineer and AI Engineer at Tusk (https://www.usetusk.ai), to uncover the journey, challenges, and triumphs of building a company from the ground up. Sohan, who holds an MS in Computer Science from Columbia University, brings a unique blend of academic excellence and hands-on experience. Before joining Tusk, an innovative AI agent company that generates unit tests for pull requests with codebase and business context, Sohan honed his skills with internships at Amazon (Software Engineer) and AbbVie (Machine Learning Engineer, where he developed an AI agent to assist sales reps). Tusk (usetusk.ai) itself is a rising star in the AI landscape, backed by Y Combinator (YC W24) and having successfully raised $1.3M in a seed round. Sohan's passion lies in giving engineers back time to focus on high-impact work – a mission central to Tusk's product. Whether you're an aspiring software engineer, a CS student, or a seasoned pro considering the startup world, Sohan's practical advice on navigating the early stages of a tech company, from technical challenges to cultural dynamics, is invaluable. Timestamps: 0:00 Coming up next 0:32 Introduction 1:13 Sohan's journey 3:09 EV Compass 6:40 What Tusk is and how it works 9:25 The testing pyramid 10:30 Contexts in coding agents 12:09 Integrating business context 14:30 Language Server Protocol 16:26 The Tusk environment 17:50 Privacy and coding agents 18:47 Deterministic AI 20:40 Siblings' dynamics at Tusk 25:03 Current Tusk customers 27:25 How Tusk onboards new customers 28:40 Juggling multiple hats as a founding engineer 31:50 Getting compliance 33:14 Tusk's future milestones 35:45 Sohan's tips to future founding engineers #foundingengineer #ycombinator #startupengineering #genai #b2bSaaS #startup #entrepreneurship #softwareengineering #techpodcast #startuplife #codingagents #YCstartup