bmulholland

Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Yes; also open to Berlin-based roles

Willing to relocate: No; happy to travel

Technologies: Ruby/Rails, PostgreSQL, TypeScript/Vue, GraphQL, Elasticsearch, LLMs, Claude Code/Codex

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmulholland1/ — CV available by email

Email: hire@bmulholland.ca

I’m a hands-on engineer and former startup CTO. I work across understanding a customer’s problem, deciding what’s worth building, and bringing the product and team together to deliver it.

I spent six years co-founding and building Recital [0], an AI product for corporate legal teams. I hired, managed and led engineering while remaining hands-on in the code, shaped product and company strategy with my co-founder, and worked directly with customers and prospects. My engineering work spanned architecture, document ingestion and search, production reliability, and customer onboarding. Our document AI evolved from NLP to LLMs and vision as the technology advanced.

More recently, I’ve been designing and running a personal knowledge and agent system using Claude Code and Codex, with extensive work on context, instructions and review practices.

I’m exploring paid senior engineering, product engineering and engineering leadership roles in AI products, infrastructure or developer tools. Particularly interesting problems include making complex business information useful, improving how teams build with coding agents, and customer-facing engineering where implementation work feeds back into a better core product.

I’m also open to scoped consulting on AI product architecture or agent-assisted development.

If that sounds relevant, email me about the problem, the team and the role or project you have in mind.

[0] https://recitalapp.com/

Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Yes; also open to Berlin-based roles

Willing to relocate: No; happy to travel

Technologies: Ruby/Rails, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Elasticsearch, LLMs, AI coding

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmulholland1/ — CV available by email

Email: hire@bmulholland.ca

Technical co-founder and former CTO with around 15 years in startups, spanning engineering and product. Most recently spent six years building Recital, an AI product for corporate legal teams, staying hands-on in the code while leading engineering.

Looking for senior IC roles in AI products/infrastructure or agentic engineering/developer experience. Particularly interested in making AI useful and reliable in production, and improving how teams build with coding agents. Also open to bounded consulting engagements.

Probably! But not viable yet; the chips would be about a year behind SOTA. Note the ~16 months that the article quotes as being insanely fast to get this chip to tape-out (read: start producing). We'll have to bootstrap our way there: AI is actively being used to get us closer to viable lead times for this.

Unfortunately, there's some real physical constraints: IIRC, manufacturing a wafer takes on the order of a month, start to finish, for the physical processing.

Maybe once LLM improvements asymptote further?

You're not missing anything. That's correct.

Most Berlin sidewalks are uneven cobblestone, not a flat uniform concrete, so the cleaning is probably a lot more difficult than you're envisioning :)

Recital | Remote (Canada) | Full-time | https://recitalapp.com

In-house lawyers waste 25% of their time looking for stuff. Recital uses non-obvious ML approaches, uniquely enabled by LLMs, to help them find it. We're diving into the relatively-unexplored data buried in contracts, building layers of data analysis that are shown into an interface that feels simple and easy. It's an AI product that doesn't feel like an AI product.

We're a small, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools). Our team emphasizes strong emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

We're looking for Canada-based senior+ full-stack developers, with solid professional experience in both Ruby on Rails and a modern frontend framework (Vue, React, etc). Experience in data wrangling is a bonus.

https://recitalapp.com/careers/

I'm curious what others' experiences have been with this. I haven't tried it out yet. Is it comparable to Cursor's capabilities? More on par with VS Code Copilot? Something else entirely?

Eh, from the company's perspective this is logistically easiest--the laptop's value is hardly worth the effort.

Recital | Remote (Canada) | Full-time | https://recitalapp.com

In-house lawyers waste 25% of their time looking for stuff. Recital uses non-obvious ML approaches, uniquely enabled by LLMs, to help them find it. We're diving into the relatively-unexplored data buried in contracts, building layers of data analysis that are shown into an interface that feels simple and easy. It's an AI product that doesn't feel like an AI product.

We're a small, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools). Our team emphasizes strong emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

We're looking for Canada-based senior+ full-stack developers, with solid professional experience in both Ruby on Rails and a modern frontend framework (Vue, React, etc). Experience in data wrangling is a bonus.

https://recitalapp.com/careers/

Isn't the question closer to "/when/ does line stop going up?"

Recital | Remote (Canada) | Full-time | https://recitalapp.com

In-house lawyers waste 25% of their time looking for stuff. Recital uses non-obvious ML approaches, uniquely enabled by LLMs, to help them find it. We're diving into the relatively-unexplored data buried in contracts, building layers of data analysis that are shown into an interface that feels simple and easy. It's an AI product that doesn't feel like an AI product.

We're a small, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools).

We're looking for Canada-based senior+ full-stack developers, with solid professional experience in both Ruby on Rails and a modern frontend framework (Vue, React, etc). Experience in data wrangling is a bonus.

https://recitalapp.com/careers/

Recital | Remote (Canada) | Full-time | https://recitalapp.com

In-house lawyers waste 25% of their time looking for stuff. Recital uses non-obvious ML approaches, uniquely enabled by LLMs, to help them find it. We're diving into the relatively-unexplored data buried in contracts, building layers of data analysis that are shown into an interface that feels simple and easy. It's an AI product that doesn't feel like an AI product.

We're a small, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools).

We're looking for Canada-based senior+ full-stack developers, with solid professional experience in both Ruby on Rails and a modern frontend framework (Vue, React, etc). Experience in data wrangling is a bonus.

https://recitalapp.com/careers/

If the intersection of English and German interests you, this essay beautifully captures how the two intermingle: https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/beamer-dressman-bodybag/

I worked briefly in a team teating the BlackBerry thermals. I’d be surprised if this was the case — phones have temperature monitoring, and are designed to manage their functions to avoid overheating. There are set maximums for each external material (glass, plastic, metal), and exceeding those can result in lawsuits. (Which happen regardless…) The phones should have detected the temperature conditions and decreased power to the radios.

I’ve got interesting comparisons of BlackBerry vs Apple on this metric. Different story though.

I use https://clay.earth/ which might be what you’re looking for

Also discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40579660

Yes, and that’s actually the problem with the comment. HN guidelines are for substantive discussions, not funny quips. There’s a few HN comment guidelines [1] that could apply here, but the most directly applicable one is “Omit internet tropes.”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The other company in this space I've been following is Speak (https://www.speak.com/). Aside from supported languages, how is Univerbal different?

How do you avoid a sort of thundering herd problem when the freeze is over?

Recital | Remote (Global, core hours: North America mornings) | Full-time | https://recital.software

Recital is the negotiation workspace for contracts professionals. We're bringing the table stakes of today's programming world to contract negotiations, such as easy version control, diffs, and other features you'd find in an IDE.

We're a small, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools).

We're looking for senior/staff full-stack developers, with solid professional experience in both Ruby on Rails and a modern frontend framework (Vue, React, etc)

https://recital.software/careers/

Recital | Remote (Global, core hours: North America mornings) | Full-time | https://recital.software

Recital is the negotiation workspace for contracts professionals. We're bringing the table stakes of today's programming world to contract negotiations, such as easy version control, diffs, and other features you'd find in an IDE.

We're a small, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools).

We're looking for intermediate/senior/staff full-stack developers, with solid professional experience in both Ruby on Rails and a modern frontend framework (Vue, React, etc)

https://recital.software/careers/

Yeah, I had the same reaction last week. It's not a Ruby default because some versions of Linux can't use it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They're on the front page again today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37463864

Not a great look for anyone who read these comments...

Looks like no one has mentioned Readwise Reader (https://readwise.io/read), which I use and is a great experience.

Intel Mac Pros max out at 1.5TB of RAM, and these are max 192GB. Seems like a large drop. I've heard that Apple Silicon is more memory-efficient, maybe because of efficiencies from the tight integration with macOS. Is that enough to make up for the difference?

I used Chef's Plate in Vancouver ~5 years ago, and it was the best meal kit service I've tried. The recipes were varied, and often had unique ingredients or garnishes that I'd never have tried otherwise. None of the meal kits in Germany match that level of quality or uniqueness.

This is an interesting question, but a bit vague and therefore hard to answer. Some of the articles that come to mind are quite timeless, such as Schlep Blindness. Do you have some particular articles in mind that you think are outdated? Which? Why?

Recital | Remote (Global, core hours: North America mornings) | Full-time | https://recital.software

Recital is the negotiation workspace for contracts professionals. We’re building a web app that brings standard development tooling to the world of contract negotiations, with features analogous to version control, diffs, and other common IDE features.

We're a close-knit, global, cross-functional team, part of an early-stage, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools). You can read more about our team at https://recital.software/working-at-recital/

We're looking for an intermediate+ full-stack developer specializing in CSS, and for a backend developer (almost a data engineer) specializing in data management and background jobs.

Read more at https://recital.software/careers/

Recital | Remote (Global, core hours: North America mornings) | Full-time | https://recital.software

Recital is the negotiation workspace for contracts professionals. We're bringing the table stakes of today's programming world to contract negotiations, such as easy version control, diffs, and other features you'd find in an IDE.

We're a small, early-stage, global, all-remote startup. It's our second startup in the space (the first was acquired). We follow modern product management (discovery) & development (DORA) practices, emphasize developer experience as an accelerator of customer value, and use provably effective management techniques (à la Manager Tools).

We're looking for intermediate+ full-stack developers (specializing in CSS) and data engineer generalists.

https://recital.software/careers/