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How to Actually Get Hired
Who reads applications, which channel gets a reply, and what they screen for.
Don't make these mistakes
Don't send generic AI enthusiasm. The round closed six days ago - timing is everything. Reference Artur's "context engineering" framing if reaching out for technical roles. For commercial roles, Tim is the contact. The fact that they're distributed across London and SF at five people means remote-first is not a policy, it is the default.
What gets their attention
The cap table tells you more than the press release does. Three signals stand out. First, WeFunder, a community crowdfunding vehicle, is unusual for enterprise B2B. It suggests the founder is building a distributed audience alongside a sales pipeline, which opens a GTM approach most agent orchestration companies are not taking and will require people who can operate across both community and enterprise motions simultaneously. Second, Goodwater Capital, whose portfolio includes Kakao and ByteDance-backed consumer platforms, almost never backs pure enterprise plays. Their presence implies a broader product surface area than the current positioning suggests - either a prosumer layer or a marketplace dynamic is likely in the roadmap. Third, Transpose Platform Management invests specifically in workflow platforms that become operationally embedded and eventually acquired. Their involvement is a structural bet on Trace becoming infrastructure, not just software. When an investor whose entire thesis is about acquisition outcomes writes a cheque at seed, they are already thinking about what Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Atlassian would pay for this in three years. That timeline creates a fast and specific hiring mandate: get the product embedded in enough enterprise workflows to be irreplaceable before the platform players replicate it.
Why applying the normal way doesn't work
With only <50 employees, Trace doesn't have dedicated recruiters. Founders review applications between running the company. The challenge isn't competition — it's visibility. Direct outreach wins.
Who to contact at Trace
Founding team
Tim Cherkasov was previously a product manager at Copper, a digital asset custodian, where he delivered an institutional product for State Street. Before that, a data scientist across hedge funds and scaleups, and a founder since the age of 17 across retail tech, travel, and web3. He is the public face of Trace, has been doing press since the TechCrunch announcement, and is reachable via LinkedIn. His framing of the core problem - the brilliant intern versus the manager who knows where to put them - is intellectually tight and repeatable. His background before Trace is not extensively documented in public sources, which means outreach from someone who has engaged carefully with the product thesis will stand out against generic enthusiasm. Contact: tim@trace.so or search LinkedIn.
Artur Romanov was a senior engineer at Deliveroo, where he built the grocery data-enrichment ML pipeline covering millions of items across thousands of retailers. That is a real-world, large-scale data problem with direct architectural relevance to what Trace is building: a knowledge graph that reads messy, inconsistent operational data and makes it useful for automated decision-making. He is a multi-time founder who has led backends in logistics and finance and deployed workflow automation across engineering and ops teams. His public thesis on the product is precise and quotable: "2024 and 2025 was still about prompt engineering. Now we've moved from prompt engineering to context engineering. Whoever provides the best context at the right time is going to be the infrastructure on top of which the AI-first companies will be built." That framing is the intellectual foundation of the entire company. Reference it in outreach to Artur and you signal immediately that you understand what they are actually building, not just what the headline says. Artur is currently based in San Francisco per LinkedIn, while Tim operates from London - the founding team is already distributed across two continents at five people.
What to show them
Trace's core deployment challenge is building the knowledge graph from a company's existing tools. This is a technical implementation process that requires integrating with Slack, email, Airtable, project management software, and custom internal systems that vary by customer. Someone needs to own this process with early accounts, build the default integration playbook from scratch, and feed quality signals back to the product team in real time. At this stage this person will likely be the first US-based customer-facing hire and will have direct access to the CEO on every implementation. Core skills: experience integrating with enterprise collaboration tools (Slack API, Google Workspace, Atlassian suite); familiarity with graph database concepts or workflow mapping; ability to translate technical implementation steps into language that non-technical operations leads understand; prior experience at an early-stage enterprise SaaS company where the integration playbook did not yet exist is directly relevant. For proof of work, sketch out what a Trace knowledge graph would look like for a 50-person startup using Slack, Notion, and Linear. Identify the ten most important nodes, the most important edges between them, and where the gaps that an AI agent would fall into appear. Post it as a one-page diagram or written description publicly. It does not need to be built. It needs to show you understand the mapping problem in a real operational context.
A cold email that works at Trace
What Trace screens for
Their focus: The cap table tells you more than the press release does. Three signals stand out. First, WeFunder, a community crowdfunding vehicle, is unusual for enterprise B2B. It suggests the founder is building a distributed audience alongside a sales pipeline, which opens a GTM approach most agent orchestration companies are not taking and will require people who can operate across both community and enterprise motions simultaneously. Second, Goodwater Capital, whose portfolio includes Kakao and ByteDance-backed consumer platforms, almost never backs pure enterprise plays. Their presence implies a broader product surface area than the current positioning suggests - either a prosumer layer or a marketplace dynamic is likely in the roadmap. Third, Transpose Platform Management invests specifically in workflow platforms that become operationally embedded and eventually acquired. Their involvement is a structural bet on Trace becoming infrastructure, not just software. When an investor whose entire thesis is about acquisition outcomes writes a cheque at seed, they are already thinking about what Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Atlassian would pay for this in three years. That timeline creates a fast and specific hiring mandate: get the product embedded in enough enterprise workflows to be irreplaceable before the platform players replicate it.
Don't send a generic CV to Trace. Mirror the job posting's language to get past automated screening.
Mistakes that kill applications
At <50 people, a copy-paste CV is immediately obvious. It's an instant no.
Nobody cares what you want. Start with Enterprise AI adoption has been measurably slower than the investment cycle suggests it should be and how you'd help.
Don't apply and wait. The median AI application gets no response ever. One follow-up at day five roughly doubles reply rates.
Frequently asked questions
How do I apply to Trace?
Through the roles on our Trace jobs page, or directly to a founder or department head if you can reach them. At <50 people, direct outreach outperforms the form.
Does Trace respond to cold emails?
We're still collecting cold email data for Trace.
Who is the hiring manager at Trace?
At this size, hiring is usually run by a founder or department head.
How competitive is it to get hired at Trace?
<50-person AI companies see ~50-100 applicants per role in two weeks. The 72-hour window is your advantage.
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