Cover letters that actually get read

I'd like to apply for the Principal Engineer role on the Edge Runtime team. I've spent the last decade close to where networks meet code — first at Cloudflare on the Workers platform, then at Fly.io on Machines — and the problem space you're working on is the reason I do this for a living.

At Fly I owned the API surface for our orchestration layer: the contract between the user's deploy command and a fleet of worker hosts that have to schedule, place, drain, and migrate apps in seconds. We took p99 cold-start from 1.8s to 220ms over four quarters, mostly by being honest about which optimisations were real and which were folklore. The work that mattered most was the boring kind — instrumenting first, deciding second, and refusing to ship tuning that I couldn't measure end-to-end.

What attracts me about Vercel is the same instinct I see in the team's writing: that infra is interesting because it disappears. The recent posts on streaming SSR and the build-output API both read like documents written by people who wanted the thing they were describing to be smaller, not flashier. I'd be happy to spend the next chapter contributing to a team that holds that bar.

Thanks for the time. I'd welcome the chance to talk about specific work if useful.

I'd like to throw my hat in the ring for the Senior Product Designer role on the Notion AI surface. I've spent the last six years designing systems that have to feel calm under load — first at Asana on the project canvas, then at Figma on the file browser — and AI features sit exactly at the intersection of where my craft and curiosity meet right now.

What I think I'd bring to your team is a stubborn commitment to decisions, not options. AI surfaces tend to drift toward 'let the user pick' as a way to hide design ambiguity; the work I'm proudest of has gone the other way and made one calm choice instead of three loud ones. The new Asana inbox is the clearest example of that — we cut the surface area of the spec by 60% during design, shipped six weeks earlier than planned, and saw a 22% lift in daily active use over the quarter that followed.

Beyond product, I'd love a team where writing is part of the design process. Notion's docs and changelog already read that way to me as a user; my Figma file structure, naming conventions, and PR descriptions try to live up to the same bar. I'd love to bring that habit into a team that shares it.

I'd be glad to walk through specific work if it's useful. Thanks for reading.

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Product Manager role on the Billing team. I've spent the last four years shipping infrastructure-shaped products at Cohere, and the Billing surface at Stripe is the exact shape of problem I'd like to spend the next chapter on.

At Cohere I led the team that ships our usage-based pricing platform — a system that decides, for every API request, what to charge, when to charge it, when to drop it on the floor for fairness, and how to surface the result to a finance team that wants line-item invoices without surprises. We took it from a four-person spreadsheet to an eight-engineer org powering $40M ARR; my contribution was holding the product spec coherent against pressure from sales, finance, partnerships, and our own SRE team.

Two things attract me about the Billing role specifically. The first is that you're solving the harder version of every problem I've worked on — orders of magnitude more traffic, more SKUs, more edge cases at the legal layer. The second is your team's writing — the docs and changelogs read like they were edited by people who actually use the product, which means the right people are in the room.

I'd love to talk about where I could help. Thank you for considering my application.

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Brand Director role. I've spent the last seven years moving brands that already had loyal customers into shapes that could grow without losing them — most recently at Allbirds, where I led the rebrand that took us from a single-product story into a credible category platform without alienating the audience that built the company.

What I think you're hiring for, reading the role description carefully, isn't another rebrand — it's a brand operator who can hold the line of an established voice while shipping campaigns that move the next quarter's metrics. That's the work I'm best at. At Allbirds I held weekly editorial reviews across six channels, ran our agency relationships, and personally wrote the launch copy for the three highest-revenue campaigns of the past two years. I treat copy as the load-bearing artifact of a brand, not the decoration on top of it.

Mailchimp's voice is one of the few in this category I read on purpose, and the recent Substack work on small-business marketing made me a believer that the team behind it actually uses the product they're shipping. I'd love to be part of that team.

Thank you for the time. I've attached writing samples in the dossier.

I'd like to apply for the Principal Engineer role on the Edge Runtime team. I've spent the last decade close to where networks meet code — first at Cloudflare on the Workers platform, then at Fly.io on Machines — and the problem space you're working on is the reason I do this for a living.

At Fly I owned the API surface for our orchestration layer: the contract between the user's deploy command and a fleet of worker hosts that have to schedule, place, drain, and migrate apps in seconds. We took p99 cold-start from 1.8s to 220ms over four quarters, mostly by being honest about which optimisations were real and which were folklore. The work that mattered most was the boring kind — instrumenting first, deciding second, and refusing to ship tuning that I couldn't measure end-to-end.

What attracts me about Vercel is the same instinct I see in the team's writing: that infra is interesting because it disappears. The recent posts on streaming SSR and the build-output API both read like documents written by people who wanted the thing they were describing to be smaller, not flashier. I'd be happy to spend the next chapter contributing to a team that holds that bar.

Thanks for the time. I'd welcome the chance to talk about specific work if useful.

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Product Manager role on the Billing team. I've spent the last four years shipping infrastructure-shaped products at Cohere, and the Billing surface at Stripe is the exact shape of problem I'd like to spend the next chapter on.

At Cohere I led the team that ships our usage-based pricing platform — a system that decides, for every API request, what to charge, when to charge it, when to drop it on the floor for fairness, and how to surface the result to a finance team that wants line-item invoices without surprises. We took it from a four-person spreadsheet to an eight-engineer org powering $40M ARR; my contribution was holding the product spec coherent against pressure from sales, finance, partnerships, and our own SRE team.

Two things attract me about the Billing role specifically. The first is that you're solving the harder version of every problem I've worked on — orders of magnitude more traffic, more SKUs, more edge cases at the legal layer. The second is your team's writing — the docs and changelogs read like they were edited by people who actually use the product, which means the right people are in the room.

I'd love to talk about where I could help. Thank you for considering my application.

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Brand Director role. I've spent the last seven years moving brands that already had loyal customers into shapes that could grow without losing them — most recently at Allbirds, where I led the rebrand that took us from a single-product story into a credible category platform without alienating the audience that built the company.

What I think you're hiring for, reading the role description carefully, isn't another rebrand — it's a brand operator who can hold the line of an established voice while shipping campaigns that move the next quarter's metrics. That's the work I'm best at. At Allbirds I held weekly editorial reviews across six channels, ran our agency relationships, and personally wrote the launch copy for the three highest-revenue campaigns of the past two years. I treat copy as the load-bearing artifact of a brand, not the decoration on top of it.

Mailchimp's voice is one of the few in this category I read on purpose, and the recent Substack work on small-business marketing made me a believer that the team behind it actually uses the product they're shipping. I'd love to be part of that team.

Thank you for the time. I've attached writing samples in the dossier.

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Product Manager role on the Billing team. I've spent the last four years shipping infrastructure-shaped products at Cohere, and the Billing surface at Stripe is the exact shape of problem I'd like to spend the next chapter on.

At Cohere I led the team that ships our usage-based pricing platform — a system that decides, for every API request, what to charge, when to charge it, when to drop it on the floor for fairness, and how to surface the result to a finance team that wants line-item invoices without surprises. We took it from a four-person spreadsheet to an eight-engineer org powering $40M ARR; my contribution was holding the product spec coherent against pressure from sales, finance, partnerships, and our own SRE team.

Two things attract me about the Billing role specifically. The first is that you're solving the harder version of every problem I've worked on — orders of magnitude more traffic, more SKUs, more edge cases at the legal layer. The second is your team's writing — the docs and changelogs read like they were edited by people who actually use the product, which means the right people are in the room.

I'd love to talk about where I could help. Thank you for considering my application.

“What I think you're hiring for, reading the role description carefully, isn't another rebrand — it's a brand operator who can hold the line of an established voice while shipping campaigns that move the next quarter's metrics. That's the work I'm best at. At Allbirds I held weekly editorial reviews across six channels, ran our agency relationships, and personally wrote the launch copy for the three highest-revenue campaigns of the past two years. I treat copy as the load-bearing artifact of a brand, not the decoration on top of it.

I am writing to apply for the position of Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Yale, advertised in the March issue of the AHA Bulletin. My research investigates the institutional architecture of nineteenth-century scientific publishing, with particular attention to the role of editorial mediation in shaping what came to be regarded as legitimate empirical claim. The position's emphasis on early-modern through long-nineteenth-century intellectual history aligns directly with the trajectory of my dissertation and the next phase of my published work.

My dissertation, submitted to Cambridge in March, reconstructs the editorial correspondence of three of the most consequential journals of the period and demonstrates how methodological norms now treated as ahistorical conventions were instead the contingent outcomes of negotiations between authors, referees, and editors in particular institutional moments. Two chapters are forthcoming as journal articles; a third has been invited for review at Isis.

Beyond research, I am committed to teaching. As a supervisor at Cambridge I have led tutorials on the history of the experimental sciences for three cohorts, and I look forward to building a Yale course that introduces undergraduates to the surprisingly recent vintage of the categories they take for granted in the lab.

Thank you for your consideration. I have enclosed my CV, writing sample, and three letters of reference under separate cover.

I'd like to throw my hat in the ring for the Senior Product Designer role on the Notion AI surface. I've spent the last six years designing systems that have to feel calm under load — first at Asana on the project canvas, then at Figma on the file browser — and AI features sit exactly at the intersection of where my craft and curiosity meet right now.

What I think I'd bring to your team is a stubborn commitment to decisions, not options. AI surfaces tend to drift toward 'let the user pick' as a way to hide design ambiguity; the work I'm proudest of has gone the other way and made one calm choice instead of three loud ones. The new Asana inbox is the clearest example of that — we cut the surface area of the spec by 60% during design, shipped six weeks earlier than planned, and saw a 22% lift in daily active use over the quarter that followed.

Beyond product, I'd love a team where writing is part of the design process. Notion's docs and changelog already read that way to me as a user; my Figma file structure, naming conventions, and PR descriptions try to live up to the same bar. I'd love to bring that habit into a team that shares it.

I'd be glad to walk through specific work if it's useful. Thanks for reading.

I'd like to apply for the Principal Engineer role on the Edge Runtime team. I've spent the last decade close to where networks meet code — first at Cloudflare on the Workers platform, then at Fly.io on Machines — and the problem space you're working on is the reason I do this for a living.

At Fly I owned the API surface for our orchestration layer: the contract between the user's deploy command and a fleet of worker hosts that have to schedule, place, drain, and migrate apps in seconds. We took p99 cold-start from 1.8s to 220ms over four quarters, mostly by being honest about which optimisations were real and which were folklore. The work that mattered most was the boring kind — instrumenting first, deciding second, and refusing to ship tuning that I couldn't measure end-to-end.

What attracts me about Vercel is the same instinct I see in the team's writing: that infra is interesting because it disappears. The recent posts on streaming SSR and the build-output API both read like documents written by people who wanted the thing they were describing to be smaller, not flashier. I'd be happy to spend the next chapter contributing to a team that holds that bar.

Thanks for the time. I'd welcome the chance to talk about specific work if useful.

I'm writing to apply for the Senior Brand Director role. I've spent the last seven years moving brands that already had loyal customers into shapes that could grow without losing them — most recently at Allbirds, where I led the rebrand that took us from a single-product story into a credible category platform without alienating the audience that built the company.

What I think you're hiring for, reading the role description carefully, isn't another rebrand — it's a brand operator who can hold the line of an established voice while shipping campaigns that move the next quarter's metrics. That's the work I'm best at. At Allbirds I held weekly editorial reviews across six channels, ran our agency relationships, and personally wrote the launch copy for the three highest-revenue campaigns of the past two years. I treat copy as the load-bearing artifact of a brand, not the decoration on top of it.

Mailchimp's voice is one of the few in this category I read on purpose, and the recent Substack work on small-business marketing made me a believer that the team behind it actually uses the product they're shipping. I'd love to be part of that team.