Netic's Gap Year Software Engineers join our product team for a year to build the features that put AI in the hands of real businesses. This role is for college students who want to take a year off school to work full-time as an engineer, combining technical excellence with customer empathy to craft products that make complex AI feel simple and deliver immediate value to essential service industries.
Gap Year engineers are full-time employees, not interns. You'll earn a full salary and equity, have a dedicated mentor, and we'll cover room and board in an apartment next to our office in San Francisco or New York. The program is modeled on our first Gap Year engineer, who took a year off from Harvard to own products used by real customers, work on-site with them, and meet our board and investors before returning to finish his degree.
If you want to start a company someday, this is the year to learn how. You'll see up close how a fast-growing startup wins customers, ships product, makes hard decisions, and builds a team. You'll also leave with relationships with the investors, founders, operators, and teammates who can advise you, back you, or co-found with you when it's your turn.
We need to hire multiple Gap Year engineers who are currently enrolled in college and can commit to 12 months full-time. We hire on a rolling basis, and start dates are flexible.
What You'll Do:- Build agentic products: Design, code, and ship full-stack features for Netic's AI platform.
- Co-create with customers: Work closely with our customers, including on-site, to understand workflows, gather feedback, and turn pain points into features that stick.
- Own end-to-end delivery: Drive projects from spec to production, handling data models, APIs, front-end polish, and post-launch iteration.
- Ensure quality: Build, test, and monitor features in production to ensure reliability and performance.
- Learn how a company is built: Sit in on sales calls and leadership meetings to see how a fast-growing startup wins customers, makes decisions, and builds a team.
- Build your founder network: Get to know our board, investors, and leaders across tech-people who can advise you, back you, or build with you when you start your own company.
What You'll Bring:- Proven builder: You've shipped real projects end-to-end, whether through school, internships, hackathons, or on your own.
- Full-stack foundations: Comfortable with React, TypeScript, and Python, or ready to pick them up fast.
- AI experience (nice-to-have): Hands-on with LLM APIs, embeddings, or RAG patterns-or hunger to learn fast.
- Customer empathy: You care about the people who use what you build and want to work with them directly.
- Founder-level ambition: You want to start a company one day and want to learn how great companies are built first.
- Excellent communicator: Able to explain technical trade-offs to engineers and product decisions to customers.
Program Details:- Duration: 12 months, full-time, in person in San Francisco or New York.
- Eligibility: Currently enrolled in college and able to take a full year off before returning to finish your degree.
- Compensation: Full-time base salary and equity. [Salary range]
- Housing: Room and board fully covered, in an apartment next to our office.
What brings us together is our commitment to:
- Live to build
- Run through walls and win
- Obsess over customers in each line of code
- Lose sleep over the "almost perfect"
- Show internal locus of control
- Prioritize finesse: refinement of first principles thinking, execution, and craftsmanship
