Joining Complete
tl;dr: After 4.5 years of building Brex, I’m returning to my startup roots to join Complete as Head of Engineering. I’m hiring Senior/Staff engineers in our SF office: drop me a note at anant@complete.so or find open roles on our Careers page.
Leaving Brex
Leaving a company like Brex is never easy. The past 4 years and some months have been the most fulfilling career journey anyone could've asked for. I've had a new job at Brex almost every year:
- Built a pretty cool product for Small Business E-commerce segment (2020-mid 2021).
- Became the EM within Brex Banking, where I primarily focused on net new products, preparing for scale, and leading a year-long effort to migrate our core banking experience from Radius Bank to Column (mid-2021-2022).
- Led the launch of Brex’s newest vertical: Brex travel from concept to GA (2023).
- Most recently, I was entrusted with the largest initiative in our Summer Release: Bill Pay that I attribute to the meticulous and focused execution of 30+ engineers (2024).
All this to say, I don't think there are many companies out there that invest in their people as much as Brex does. It's one of the places where only your drive and ambition dictate how fast you can go, and that's rare to find.
Why Complete?
As a former founder whose company (Compose Labs) was acquired, coming back to startups was always on my mind. It was simply a matter of when and finding the opportunity that optimized for the three most critical determinants to a company’s success: people, market, and product. In some ways, to me, joining Complete feels like resuming my startup stage journey, but with the insights to take us from Series C (what Brex was when I started) and beyond!
People
Complete has a small but a formidable team. Rani, our CEO, is not only one of the best Product and Sales person I’ve met, but also has a very clear “Founder-Market Fit” — after wrapping up her time as a PM at Google, she spent months being a comp consultant for various companies to validate the pain that Complete solves for enterprises.
On top of that, every engineer I met during the interview process had just the right mix of humility, intensity, and compassion. This balance made it obvious that I would be excited to come to work every day. Spending a few hours with the team made it very clear that Complete moves fast, perhaps faster than most startups at this stage!
On top of all this, we have a community of technology leaders and operators like Will Larson (CTO of Carta), Eric Sagar (COO of Plaid), Mathilde Collin (CEO of Front) as our angels and/or advisors, and I very much look forward to learning from this group.
Market
Leading orgs at a 1000+ person company quickly makes you acutely aware managing compensation — often times a company’s biggest expense — is one of the deepest unsolved pain points for the HR and Finance teams and managers alike, as well as one of the highest leverage missed opportunities for companies to improve their employee retention:
- These compensation cycles are run with a dozen+ spreadsheets, where the decision makers (executives, VPs, directors, managers, etc.) do not necessarily have all the information (”What is the compa ratio for this role/level/geo?”) or even eduction (“What is this compa ratio?”). Think about how much collective time and money is spent by some of the most senior leaders of a business, solely around figuring out how to run a fair compensation program.
- The compensation team has to spend endless hours chasing approvers, combining these dozen spreadsheets into one, and finally figuring out if the raises across the company are within the budget set by the finance team. It’s fair to say that enterprises lack the expertise to build and operate a defensible compensation strategy, making it one of the most costly mistakes to their financial and operational efficiency.
- And it’s only getting worse with companies going global and/or adopting some version of remote work earlier in their lifecycle, leading to more geos than spreadsheets can handle in the first place. This usually results in inequitable, but “simple enough to run with a spreadsheet” compensation practices, which in turn leads to suboptimal outcomes for employees and companies when their best employees leave for (perceived) better compensation. We can and should be doing better by our employees.
Product
I had the chance to shadow a few sales calls and experience first-hand how our prospects lit up when they saw Complete. One direct quote from the past week:
“We’ve been looking for something like this for a while, and I can tell you that we’ve looked at multiple “competitors” but no one that actually solves this problem fully like you do.”
Complete’s suite of tools that target the entire employee lifecycle from issuing interactive offer letters → designing levels and running compensation cycles → communicating new compensation and benefits to employees have a very clear product-market fit, where there’s more in the sales pipeline than our lean team can handle. Our customers already include highly impactful startups like Render, Brex, Linear, and DataStax, all the way to world-class enterprises like Roblox. The “pull” from the market is very real and it’s clear that Complete is at an inflection point that is quite rare to find in the startup world.
As I start this new role, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I don’t do my part to convince you to come with me, which is one of the reasons behind writing this post :) We’re looking for Senior/Staff engineers to add to our lean team and help us scale us to a $XXM+ in ARR. If you’re curious about our tech stack or our interview process, you can check out Are you our next Founding Senior/Staff Engineer? or drop me a note at anant@complete.so.