Justin Tahara

Justin Tahara

OnyxOnyx
Founding Infra Engineer @ Onyx
67 points

About

I’m Justin—Founding Infrastructure Engineer at Onyx ☁️. I design, build, and scale the cloud platform that powers Onyx’s AI for enterprise knowledge. - Infra: Kubernetes/Helm · Terraform + AWS · GitHub Actions · Observability 🔭 - Data: Postgres/Aurora - Recent work: secure permission syncing 🔐 · release workflow improvements 🔄 · Vespa performance tuning ⚡️ - Backstory: Cloud infra @ Applied Intuition; M.S. CS from UC San Diego 🎓 - What I’m into: tools that reduce toil and unlock velocity for small infra teams 🚀

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Maker History

  • Onyx
    OnyxThe open source AI teammate you've dreamed of
    Sep 2025
  • 🎉
    Joined Product HuntJuly 28th, 2025

Forums

Founding Infra Engineer ☁️ @ Onyx! AMA about Onyx

Hey PH team!

My names Justin and have been working on Cloud Infra at Onyx!! I m sure there s some questions from new faces so feel free to thread below!

Justin Tahara

4mo ago

Is 996 quietly becoming the norm at AI Startups?

The AI gold rush feels like it rewards teams who ship fast. Many teams are working on a 9-9-6 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) schedule to keep up with the state of the art breakthroughs and features. Does this give teams an edge against their competition or is this slowly burning teams out.
If you're building in the AI space, I would love to hear what your take is:

  • What works for your team and do you follow the 996 schedule?

  • Did following a 996 culture create more bugs or actually lead to breakthroughs and push you ahead of your competition?

  • How would you balance your life outside of work if you followed this schedule?

Making this post to raise awareness and ideally find a middle ground for teams that are currently growing and trying to keep up with the competition

Justin Tahara

4mo ago

If code is easier to generate, what roles become the real bottleneck now?

Being an engineer myself, I see that many people are outputting more code than ever. Some of it being generated vs. written, the volume of code being outputted has definitely risen. 
There seems to be a shift from "is this something we can build?" to "should we build this and ship it?"
For people who have been recruiting or looking to recruit recently, what roles are you hiring for? 

  1. Role title (I've seen a rise in PM's and Designers personally)

  2. What exactly can they do that AI can't (yet)

  3. Specific signal that you look for when hiring

Are you moving headcount from one type of role to another? 
Would be interested to hear from other growing teams! 

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