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by Scorpiion 1466 days ago
Very interesting, tempted to apply to the company as this sounds very promising and fun to work on...

I'm curious about the business side of things, to give some context, some open source models that startups use today are:

1. The "open core" model, Gitlab being a good example. They try to split features that are open or closed/enterprise depending on the buyer.

2. The AGPL model, Mongodb used to do this, today a popular example is Grafana and their collection of products.

3. The Apache + cloud backend model, the core being standalone working with Apache license while building a value added managed service. I think this is what Synadia is doing with NATS.

4. The "source available" model, not really open source, but worth mentioning as it's very popular recently. Examples Mongodb, Elastic, Cochroachdb and TimescaleDB. This is often combined with open source such that some parts are open source, others source available.

With this as a reference Nikita, how would you explain how Neon thinks in regards to licensing and eventually building a healthy business? It's obvious a managed database service is the money maker, but how do you think around compeditors taking the project and building managed services without or with minimal code contributions? I'm sure you guys have thought a lot about this, would be interesting to hear some thoughts and reasoning for or against different options.

(Note: This is not meant to be an extensive explanation of these business models just a high level overview. If I have miscategorized some company above feel free to correct me in a comment.)

1 comments

It's 3. Our intention is to only monetize DbaaS revenue and opensource all/most of the tech with Apache 2.0 license. It's similar to that of Databricks. Databricks over time built out photon that is proprietary. We will stay away from this ideally forever. Enduring technologies are fully open source, we see an opportunity to build a standard scalable storage tier for Postgres and maybe for other engines over time (other engines are off strategy right now).

Please do apply! we are hiring around the globe!

> Please do apply! we are hiring around the globe!

Do you expect candidates to have background in database development?

Also, any advice for someone looking to transition their career from backend to database development?

Systems >> databases for the engine. We also need fullstack or product engineers - modern DevX requires good UI. We also hire SREs and support
Tips for transitioning to database development: learn rust, start working on systems, ideally get a systems job, and optimize for being prolific. Write a lot of code
Thank you, I will follow this advice.

Neon is open source, and in Rust, I will start with that and would try to contribute.

I am very tempted to apply because it’s remote too, but do you also pay independent of the location?

Also, do you ask leet code style questions in the 1:1 rounds? More details would be appreciated

Please apply! Are cost is location adjusted. In most areas we pay 90th percentile
Interesting and glad to hear, I think it makes a lot of sense in this case!