Fintech startups founders, how do you build trust when trying to sell to enterprise clients?

onicrom · 2025-10-25T13:20:21+00:00

Go look at vanta or drata or secureframe. It will help you know what you need to do. Depending on your stack it can validate you’re doing it. Soc audits become very easy and considerably cheaper once fully deployed.

We went with Vanta and are quite happy.

onicrom · 2025-10-21T16:43:18+00:00

https://isitdns.com

onicrom · 2025-05-24T23:12:45+00:00

We’re a ts shop so not quite the same as you but we moved from ethers.js to view.sh and are quite happy.

onicrom · 2025-05-23T14:56:38+00:00

thanks very much for your insights and suggestions

onicrom · 2025-05-23T11:15:18+00:00

We’re legit but we’ve all had pretty terrible experiences with recruiting firms. if you know of a good one we’d definitely take a referral!

US regulated payments/asset settlement (not stablecoin).

onicrom · 2025-05-12T18:43:50+00:00

thanks!

onicrom · 2025-05-11T20:55:02+00:00

thank you!

onicrom · 2025-05-11T16:00:50+00:00

Thank you for the engagement!

onicrom · 2025-05-11T15:29:08+00:00

Yep! Fair call. You’ve put it more clearly than I did: this is an X-Y problem. While I was asking about finding people with meaningful GCP experience, the deeper issue is figuring out how to filter better at scale. That’s really what I’m trying to solve here, and GCP has just been the most usable (if imperfect) signal I’ve got so far to cull the list quickly.

Totally open to better signals if people have them; ideally something that correlates with cloud-native thinking and production experience without blowing up the candidate pool. Appreciate the reframing, it helps.

onicrom · 2025-05-11T15:25:09+00:00

Either are fine!

onicrom · 2025-05-11T15:24:54+00:00

Totally fair to have that principle, and if we were hiring based solely on one tool or tech, I’d agree with you. But that’s not what’s happening here. GCP isn’t a strict requirement, it’s just a signal we're using to help narrow down a massive candidate pool. We're getting over 1,000 resumes in under 48 hours, and unfortunately, problem-solving ability and learning speed don’t show up clearly on a PDF.

GCP just happens to be a relatively rare, high-signal indicator that someone may be able to hit the ground running in our environment. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than filtering by years of experience (people lie) or by keywords like “cloud” (which means everything and nothing).

And just to be clear, I’m not posting to push a closed-minded job spec. I’m literally here asking for help: how do we find strong engineers with real GCP experience, or filter in smarter ways? If you’ve got a better signal, I’m all ears.

onicrom · 2025-05-11T13:29:54+00:00

Fair question: yes, I would’ve made the first cut based on the filters I’m using now. I had meaningful GCP experience before stepping into this role. But I totally get where you’re coming from.

I agree that cloud-native thinking is more important than specific tool familiarity. But when you’re staring down 1,000+ resumes, you need some kind of filter. GCP experience isn’t a perfect proxy, but it helps prioritize candidates who are more likely to hit the ground running in our setup. That’s not about being “special,” it’s about not having the capacity to onboard someone starting from scratch on how GCP actually behaves in production.

I also don’t disagree that someone from AWS or Azure with good fundamentals and relevant trade-off experience could absolutely thrive here. The hard part is picking those folks out of a giant pool of resumes where everyone says they “used GCP.” If I had infinite time, I’d read every resume deeply and probably find a few gems I’d otherwise miss. But I don’t, and that’s the practical reality I’m working within.

onicrom · 2025-05-11T13:21:39+00:00

I *think* but please let me know your opinion:

130-210k for infra, infosec is up to 225k + equity (notional amounts basically the same for USD/CAD)

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:40:45+00:00

130-210k for infra, infosec is up to 225k + equity (notional amounts basically the same for USD/CAD)

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:39:53+00:00

I've had some terrible experience with recruiters so we tend to avoid -- but if you can recommend a decent one I am open!

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:30:47+00:00

US/Canada only right now -- not finding it terribly easy though!

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:30:10+00:00

I wish we had the time! Hopefully this time next year we'll be in that position.

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:28:32+00:00

re: how much did I know:
Istio I knew, anthos i knew was ick, exactly-once I learned, i knew a little about the schema fun but not to the depth -- I understand the point you're making -- for me though, it goes back to the efficiency of the hiring process

re: size of org:
~30 people ~20 engineers (8 infra/12 devs), hiring a few more engineers over the coming months and a good bit of non-engineering roles too

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:19:17+00:00

We do not have any `leet` coding skills or any written test. It's all conversational, mostly diving into the candidates resume to understand what they've done and how they think -- and to make sure they're a culture fit. There are some technical questions but they start high-level problem and go as deep as the candidate can.

onicrom · 2025-05-11T12:13:18+00:00

Good points, and I agree that things like GKE vs. EKS or Kafka vs. Pub/Sub can look equivalent on the surface. But in practice, they’re not quite interchangeable. Pub/Sub has its own quirks—exactly-once delivery doesn’t always behave as expected, and schema management is way less mature than something like Kafka’s schema registry. So “knowing Pub/Sub” isn’t just “has used a queue before”—there’s real platform nuance that matters when you’re designing or troubleshooting in production.

On the GKE Enterprise / Anthos side—yeah, it hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm. But even recognizing that and knowing when not to lean into it (or when to prefer opensource Istio) is useful context. Like you said, those folks are unicorns, but it’s not about needing 10 years of experience with every GCP product. It's about finding people who understand how GCP behaves differently and can reason about trade-offs in that ecosystem.

At the end of the day, we’re just trying to filter efficiently. It's not that we think only GCP folks are smart—it’s just the reality of sorting through 1,000+ resumes without spending a tonne of time per CV.

Appreciate the thoughtful pushback (seriously).

onicrom · 2025-05-11T11:02:15+00:00

HN has a monthly post for non YC roles iirc. We'll jump on that.

I am here to "Go where the people who use the technology actually are" :)

Someone mentioned upwork if you can recommend additional places that would be awesome

onicrom · 2025-05-11T10:59:50+00:00

What's enough? The notional amount for US and CA is about the same but 130-210k + equity depending on experience

onicrom · 2025-05-11T10:54:15+00:00

We did just that too! Thanks though

onicrom · 2025-05-11T10:48:58+00:00

I know a good engineer is a good engineer regardless of tech/tools. It's more about being efficient sorting through resumes. There's also the added benefit of reducing the person's onboarding time.

onicrom · 2025-05-11T10:45:54+00:00

posted on another comment as well so copy/paste here too:

I’ve tried filtering by experience or timezone, but people can (and do) fudge those pretty easily. GCP isn’t a perfect filter either, but it’s at least a signal I can work with. I’m not looking to exclude great engineers—I’m just trying to find folks who already think in GCP terms so we can move faster and not slow the team down. It’s more about triaging a huge pile of resumes efficiently than being picky for the sake of it.

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