OnFrontiers | Senior Engineer | Hybrid/Remote | NYC or Baltimore
OnFrontiers is hiring a strong senior engineer with experience programming agents to lead development of our agentic intelligence platform for government contractors.
We're looking for a passionate, curious engineer, who wants to work closely with our founding team and contribute as both a technical expert and a member of the product leadership.
In the role, you'll lead development of our indexing services, LLM integrations and APIs, as well as our SaaS platform, as we continue to scale. The role is hands-on but has the potential to grow into management as the team scales.
Core technologies include OpenSearch, Postgres & PGVector, Go, Python and React, all running on AWS.
A CS degree costs something like 124 yrs salary for someone in a low income nation—and it’s a much longer harder road. I’m not AI’s biggest fan, but arguably, this type of tech actually narrows the gap. Even if it’s expensive.
That’s a false equivalence¹. You don’t need a CS degree² to become a good programmer, you can do it with time, perseverance, and access to an old machine. Additionally, even if you needed a CS degree, you don’t keep paying for that indefinitely³ and get skills which last for life. An LLM subscription is something you have to keep paying for, and are screwed if you can no longer afford it, it goes down, or you’re in a place without internet connectivity.
³ In the sense that it’s not a subscription. I get that in the US you may be paying for student loans for an unreasonably long time, but that’s not normal for the rest of the world.
It sounds like you are talking about the cost of doing a CS degree in a developed country. The $736 (number used in article, source World bank) number multiplied by 124 gives you $93k. That is enough to manage a degree at one of the cheaper (but perfectly OK - regulated to ensure minimum standards) universities in the UK such as Chester. It cover one year of fees at Oxford but not leave you much to live on. I am pretty sure there are cheaper options in Europe.
Of course, someone from a low income nation is most likely to go to university in their own country which is a whole lot cheaper (and a lot of low and middle income countries have free or subsidised university education - which is why British hospitals were historically had lots of South Asian doctors, and now Africans). If their own country does not offer the right degree or demand for limited places is very high they can study in another low or middle income country (I know Sri Lankans who have studied in India).
This is utter bullshit. An American CS degree might cost that much, but why would someone from a developing country (who isn't rich or getting a scholarship) want one of those?
The actual cost of a CS degree varies a lot depending on the country, but here in Vietnam I think it's about $1000 per term at public universities. That's not cheap, it's about a year at minimum wage here. But it's a long, long way from your claim of 124 years.
And to forestall the obvious next claim: Vietnamese education is quite good actually. Maybe you won't be going to Harvard but there's plenty of universities in the top 1000 worldwide with a few in the top 200 (no idea for the ranking for CS specifically though).
That's for international students going to the UK to study CS. There is not much point for anyone to go to the UK to study CS for that amount of money (unless they already live there, but they get their degree for a third or even less of that money).
It's normal for international student tuition fees to be inflated by many universities, they try to collect some extra revenue based on a perceived extra prestige, especially the US and UK.
Similar to charging different prices for tourists than for locals.
> There is not much point for anyone to go to the UK to study CS for that amount of money (unless they already live there, but they get their degree for a third or even less of that money)
A lot of people do though. There are lots of international students, many from low and middle income countries. Obviously from high income families.
> It's normal for international student tuition fees to be inflated by many universities, they try to collect some extra revenue based on a perceived extra prestige,
In the UK the government heavily subsidises the fees of British students (basically defined as having lived in the UK for the previous three years, other than on a student visa - there are some other complexities but that is the simple version) whereas overseas fees are the full market rate.
> Similar to charging different prices for tourists than for locals.
You are factually wrong, a Yemeni does not need to pay 100+ years of salary to get a CS degree, end of story.
Also, I've been a researcher and have few scientific papers published (you can search for my name on scholar: Enrico Polanski) and I've seen ZERO evidence that a student from Harvard or Imperial to be more knowledgeable than one in unnamed universities from the third world you've never heard about. None.
It's way too personal and student dependent. Plenty of people in ivy league famous colleges study to ace exams and don't remember shit few weeks later. Plenty of people in unnamed universities are genuinely curious.
Your college makes very little difference in how prepared you will be. Single teachers/courses may have an impact, but the location very little.
> You are factually wrong, a Yemeni does not need to pay 100+ years of salary to get a CS degree, end of story.
So far as I can tell, the like-for-like comparison is as per the other commenter you responded to: here's a fancy thing rich people in rich countries use, therefore the comparison is to a rich country's degree.
This is because you also don't need to pay 38.6 months of income to get access to an AI. Not even to access OpenAI's best. And even the downgrade after usage limits is not terrible.
Of course, if you don't like this comparison, then sure, I'd accept what you say. I'm disagreeing about the assumptions of what's comparable here.
> I've seen ZERO evidence that a student from Harvard or Imperial to be more knowledgeable than one in unnamed universities from the third world you've never heard about.
Mm. Tempted to agree even without looking you up: I'm British, so my reference point for "fancy university isn't automatically great" is half the British politicians.
OTOH, after I graduated, I did live in Cambridge (UK) for nearly a decade, and I do miss how incredibly densely packed it was with nerds, it's not something I found in other places.
The difference in quality is not the same. I have worked with graduates of universities from a middle income country (Sri Lanka) and they are pretty good. Plenty of them get jobs in western countries as developers. What they miss out on is not technical skills so much as international exposure to a more developed economy and culture.
There might be a bit of misunderstanding on what's in that git repo here. It actually contains the executor, state store, queue, and our production UI, plus the syncing, registration, and logic for functions.
Earlier this year we didn't want folks to roll their own production cloud due to queueing migrations. It would make your life hard. We're entirely responsible for that right now, as we discouraged self hosting.
That's actually coming to a close, and we'll make it easy to spin up prod clusters using this code and eg. MemoryDB, Dragonfly, or what have you.
Let me know when you do! I like the pattern and APIs you've designed for the SDKs—and would probably rely on a managed coordination layer like you've got. But, in order to build confidence in any product like this, we have to know that if something happened to the co, or you went another direction, we could fork the core and continue on.
Well, my experience has been closer to the "more eyes make for shallow bugs" school of thought, so opening the source to contributions would actually help that process, not hinder it
I've written quite a lot of CI for projects because it's something I believe in and am willing to roll up my sleeves to get done (as a concrete example). I believe strongly that being able to reference the canonical CI build helps contributors since they can see how it's built for different systems and also ensure they don't submit "works on my machine" patches
If you’re supposed to replace modern cartridges every 3-5 shaves, I’ve been doing it wrong. The steel blades in a cartridge easily stay sharp through dozens of shaves. The reason people replace cartridges is because they get clogged with soap and hair. If you rinse them every time, they last significantly longer than single blades.
Databricks has been struggling to defend Delta against the fast-moving improvements and widening adoption of Iceberg, championed by two of its major competitors, AWS and Snowflake. This article seems like a bizarre, and maybe even misleading, artifact, given that no one in the industry is comparing Parquet to Delta. They’re weighing Iceberg, which like Delta, can organize and structure groups of parquet (or other format) files…
I did some keyword research and wrote this post cause lots of folks are doing searches for Delta Lake vs Parquet. I'm just trying to share a fair summary of the tradeoffs with folks who are doing this search. It's a popular post and that's why I figured I would share it here.
This is a completely naive view of companies and how they work.
An alternative metaphor is this: imagine you got a dog, raised him, lost your sources of income and couldn’t afford to feed him. You kept him anyway out of pride or loyalty or whatever, and watched as he withered away without adequate resources to make him thrive. At the same time, others were looking for dogs and were fully willing to feed them and support them.
When companies don’t do thoughtful adjustments like layoffs, they end up instead in a cycle of slow withering, where the best resources leave and aren’t replaced, and the quality of the workforce slowly decays.
Layoffs may not be “fun” but they’re a necessary part of operating a successful company… and much better than the alternative.
OnFrontiers is hiring a strong senior engineer with experience programming agents to lead development of our agentic intelligence platform for government contractors.
We're looking for a passionate, curious engineer, who wants to work closely with our founding team and contribute as both a technical expert and a member of the product leadership.
In the role, you'll lead development of our indexing services, LLM integrations and APIs, as well as our SaaS platform, as we continue to scale. The role is hands-on but has the potential to grow into management as the team scales.
Core technologies include OpenSearch, Postgres & PGVector, Go, Python and React, all running on AWS.
https://www.onfrontiers.com/job-postings/lead-engineer
Interested, feel free to email me directly: lgsilver[at]onfrontiers.com