About
We build the reviewer
we wanted on our own team.
Firstpass started in 2023 with three engineers who were tired of waiting a day for a first comment. Today 34 people work on it, and it reviews code for 412 teams.
The story
Ines, Tomas and Priya met on a payments team where a pull request waited nine hours, on average, for its first review. Most of those first reviews found the same things: a missing test, a query in a loop, a key that should not have been committed. None of it needed a person, and all of it kept people from the review that did.
So they wrote a reviewer that does the checkable part first, and does it properly: it builds the branch, runs the tests and says only what it can show. The first version reviewed their own pull requests for four months before anyone else saw it. It still reviews every change we ship.
Founded
2023
People
34
Time zones, fully remote
9
Principles
Three rules we
hold ourselves to.
01
Prove it or do not say it.
A comment needs evidence: a failing test, a measured cost or a rule the team wrote. Without one it is not posted.
02
A comment is a cost.
Every remark takes a person’s attention. We measure how many comments lead to a change and remove the kinds that do not.
03
Your code is yours.
It is processed for the review and deleted when the review is posted. It never trains a model, ours or anyone’s.
Team
Six of the
thirty-four.
Ines Marlow
Co-founder, CEO
Ran the payments platform team at a bank before this.
Tomas Reyes
Co-founder, CTO
Wrote the first build runner on a train to Porto.
Priya Nand
Co-founder, Head of Research
Works on how a model shows its evidence.
Jonas Feld
Staff Engineer, Runners
Got the median review under 100 seconds.
Amara Osei
Head of Security
Owns deletion, audits and the secret scanner.
Kenji Mori
Engineering Manager, Languages
Shipped Kotlin and Swift support in v3.8.
Careers
Open roles
We hire in any time zone between UTC-8 and UTC+9. Salaries are listed in USD and are the same for the role wherever you live.
Senior Compiler Engineer
Build the call-graph tracing that decides which tests a change affects. $185,000 to $215,000.
Languages
Remote
Full time
Product Designer
Design how a review reads inside someone else’s interface. $140,000 to $165,000.
Product
Remote
Full time
Developer Advocate
Work with open source maintainers and write the docs you wish existed. $130,000 to $155,000.
Community
Remote
Full time
Support Engineer (EMEA)
Answer engineers within the hour and fix what you can yourself. $95,000 to $115,000.
Support
Remote
Full time
Applications open on the careers board
