about me
As a black man I have to work twice as hard for half the credit
Austin Starks answers being called a DEI hire by listing the record, with the receipt for each claim on screen.
A master's in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon on a GEM Fellowship, which covers full tuition and fees plus a stipend and paid internships. A Bachelor of Arts in computational biology from Cornell. An external edits integration built at Oscar Health that resulted in over forty million dollars of income. A first-place finish at the USA Powerlifting Ivy League Championships, and a 455 pound max squat. And NexusTrade, an AI-native algorithmic trading platform he built alone: roughly 1.6 million lines of code across about sixteen thousand commits, written at night after work.
Figures are as of September 2026. The compensation range shown for Figma is from levels.fyi and describes the company, not an individual offer.
Transcript
0:00I'm a DEI hire.
0:02I was a software engineer at Coinbase, and in a few weeks I start at Figma, where I'll make at least three hundred thousand dollars a year. Here's the resume that got me there.
0:11I have a master's in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and I went there on a full ride. U.S. News ranks Carnegie Mellon number one in the country for both artificial intelligence and software engineering.
0:22Before that I went to Cornell, where I studied computational biology.
0:26At Oscar Health I built an external edits integration that resulted in over forty million dollars of income for the company.
0:33I'm a competitive powerlifter who won the Ivy League Championship, and my max squat is four hundred and fifty five pounds.
0:41And I built NexusTrade entirely by myself, which is one point six million lines of code across sixteen thousand commits, and I wrote almost all of it at night after work.
0:52That's the diversity hire.
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