Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how Ontologize Inc., a California corporation with offices at 1225 Crane St, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA ("Ontologize," "we," "us," or "our"), collects, uses, shares, and protects personal data in connection with Forward Deployed Engineer Jobs, also referred to as forwarddeployedengineer.com(the "Service").

This Privacy Policy is incorporated into our Terms of Service.

1. Scope

This Privacy Policy applies to:

• Visitors who browse the Service.
• Candidates who browse listings, search jobs, click apply links, subscribe to the FDE Jobs Brief, or otherwise interact with the Service.
• Employers who create accounts, submit listings, purchase listing tiers, receive listing analytics, or communicate with us.
• Subscribers to the FDE Jobs Brief, launch updates, employer updates, candidate updates, or related communications.
• People who contact us through forms, email, or other channels.
• People whose business contact information we process for employer outreach, partnership outreach, media outreach, or sales purposes.
• Other users of the Service.

At launch, candidates cannot create accounts, save jobs, upload resumes, or apply directly through the Service unless we expressly make those features available. If we add candidate accounts, saved jobs, profiles, resumes, alerts, or similar features, we may update this Privacy Policy or provide additional disclosures.

This Privacy Policy does not apply to personal data submitted directly to Employer websites, applicant tracking systems, or other third-party websites linked from the Service. Those sites operate under their own terms and privacy policies.

The Service is operated from the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your personal data may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in the United States.

2. Our Role

Ontologize generally acts as the controller of personal data processed in connection with the Service.

Where an Employer includes personal data about third parties in a listing, such as a hiring manager, recruiter, or contact person, the Employer is responsible for ensuring it has the right to provide that information. In that context, Ontologize processes the data to provide the Service.

3. Personal Data We Collect

The personal data we collect depends on how you interact with the Service.

3.1 Visitors and Candidates

When you visit the Service, browse listings, search jobs, or click job links, we and our service providers may collect:

• Technical data, such as IP address, user agent, device type, browser type, operating system, approximate location derived from IP address, referrer, timestamps, pages viewed, and request metadata.
• Usage data, such as searches, filters, page views, listing views, link clicks, outbound apply clicks, session activity, UTM parameters, referral source, and interaction events.
• Analytics data, such as aggregate traffic patterns, conversion events, listing performance, featured placement performance, and similar measurement data.
• Cookie, pixel, tag, and similar technology data, as described in the cookies and tracking section.
• Conversational search data, if you use AI-assisted search, including prompts, returned outputs, session identifiers, and related usage metadata.

We do not collect resumes, CVs, cover letters, application answers, work samples, or other application materials that you submit directly to Employer or third-party application sites.

3.2 FDE Jobs Brief and Email Subscribers

If you subscribe to the FDE Jobs Brief, launch updates, employer updates, candidate updates, or related communications, we may collect:

• Email address.
• Name, if provided.
• Organization or employer name, if provided.
• Whether you identified as a candidate, Employer, recruiter, founder, investor, partner, media contact, or other audience type.
• Subscription preferences.
• Consent timestamp and source.
• Unsubscribe and suppression status.
• Email delivery, open, click, bounce, and engagement data, where available.
• Associated technical and usage data.

We use this data to send the communications you requested, manage subscription preferences, maintain suppression lists, measure performance, improve relevance, and comply with applicable email laws.

We may use beehiiv, Resend, or another email service provider to manage subscriptions and send emails.

You may unsubscribe at any time using the link in each email or by contacting us.

3.3 Contact Form Submitters and Direct Communications

When you contact us, we may collect:

• Name.
• Email address.
• Organization name.
• Message content.
• Any other information you choose to provide.
• Associated technical and usage data.

We use this data to respond to your inquiry, manage correspondence, and maintain appropriate records.

3.4 Business Outreach Contacts

We may collect and use business contact information for employer outreach, partnership outreach, media outreach, and sales or customer development purposes.

This may include:

• Name.
• Work email.
• Job title.
• Company.
• LinkedIn profile.
• Public social media profile.
• Company website.
• Employer hiring information.
• Notes about our communications.

Sources may include information you provide, public websites, public social media or professional profiles, employer career pages, referrals, events, and third-party sales or contact data providers.

We may use CRM, email, enrichment, and outreach tools, including tools such as Apollo, Clay, Instantly, HubSpot, Gmail, LinkedIn, or similar providers. We use this information to identify relevant Employers, invite Employers to submit listings, communicate about the Service, manage outreach, and maintain opt-out or suppression records.

If you do not want to receive outreach from us, contact privacy@ontologize.com or use any unsubscribe or opt-out mechanism included in our message.

3.5 Employers

When an Employer creates an account, submits a listing, purchases a listing, manages listings, receives analytics, or communicates with us, we may collect:

• Identity and account data, such as name, work email, employer or organization name, role, account ID, authentication identifiers, and identity claims from our authentication provider.
• Listing content, such as job title, description, location, salary range, benefits, remote status, application URL, company description, company logo, images, badges, employer attributes, and other materials submitted or approved by the Employer.
• Badge and attribute data, such as information used to display labels including "Palantir alum," "YC," "Featured," or similar designations.
• Billing and transaction data, such as Stripe checkout session IDs, payment intent IDs, invoice IDs, transaction amount, currency, status, refund records, and related metadata. Full card numbers are processed by Stripe and are not stored on our infrastructure.
• Listing analytics data, such as views, clicks, outbound apply clicks, referral sources, search appearances, approximate IP-derived location information, featured placement performance, comparisons between featured and non-featured listings, newsletter inclusion metrics, and other performance data.
• Communications data, such as support requests, listing review correspondence, sales or employer outreach, and other messages.
• Audit and security data, such as sign-ins, listing create/edit/delete events, payment events, account events, administrative actions, IP addresses, user agents, and timestamps.

3.6 Curated and Public Listing Data

At launch, listings are expected to be submitted by invited or approved Employers. In the future, we may collect job listing and company information from public sources, including Employer career pages, public applicant tracking system pages, public job posts, company websites, public company profiles, or other public sources.

This may include company names, job titles, job descriptions, application URLs, locations, salary ranges, recruiter contact information if publicly included in a listing, and related public metadata.

We may use this information to operate the job board, classify roles, link candidates to original application pages, improve market coverage, and provide market analysis.

3.7 Data We Ask You Not to Provide

Do not submit the following to the Service unless we expressly authorize it in writing:

• Sensitive personal information, such as health data, racial or ethnic origin, religious beliefs, biometric data, precise geolocation, government ID numbers, or financial account information.
• Authentication secrets, passwords, API keys, tokens, or private keys.
• Classified information.
• Controlled unclassified information.
• Export-controlled technical data.
• Third-party confidential information.
• Information you are not authorized to disclose.

4. How We Use Personal Data

We may use personal data to:

• Operate, maintain, secure, and improve the Service.
• Display, classify, tag, summarize, and organize job listings.
• Help candidates discover relevant roles.
• Provide AI-assisted search, drafting, classification, and related features.
• Authenticate Employers and manage accounts.
• Process payments, refunds, receipts, invoices, and billing records.
• Provide listing analytics to Employers according to their listing tier.
• Send the FDE Jobs Brief and other communications requested by subscribers.
• Send service, account, billing, legal, security, and operational notices.
• Respond to inquiries, support requests, outreach replies, and legal requests.
• Monitor, debug, measure, and improve site performance.
• Conduct analytics, attribution, campaign measurement, conversion tracking, and retargeting.
• Detect, investigate, and prevent fraud, abuse, scraping, spam, security incidents, and violations of our Terms.
• Enforce our Terms and protect our rights.
• Comply with legal obligations, including tax, accounting, fraud prevention, and lawful requests.
• Create aggregated, de-identified, or anonymized statistics, reports, and market analysis.

We do not use candidate browsing activity to make automated employment decisions.

5. Analytics, Advertising, Cookies, Pixels, and Retargeting

We use cookies, pixels, tags, server logs, and similar technologies for security, functionality, analytics, attribution, advertising measurement, and retargeting.

These technologies may collect or help us infer:

• Pages viewed.
• Listing views.
• Search and filter activity.
• Outbound apply clicks.
• Referral source.
• UTM parameters.
• Device and browser information.
• Approximate location derived from IP address.
• Session information.
• Email opens and clicks.
• Conversion events, such as subscriptions, job post submissions, account creation, checkout starts, purchases, pricing-page visits, report downloads, and application-link clicks.

We may use analytics and advertising technologies to understand how users find and use the Service, improve the product, measure marketing campaigns, report listing performance to Employers, and show ads to people who have previously interacted with the Service.

For example, we may use retargeting to show ads to visitors who viewed employer pricing, clicked "Post a job," read the State of FDE Jobs report, browsed listings, or visited candidate resources but did not complete a related action.

These technologies may be provided by advertising, analytics, and measurement partners such as Google, LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, X, Vercel, PostHog, Plausible, Google Analytics, or similar providers. The specific providers we use may change over time.

Depending on the listing tier, Employers may receive analytics about their own listings, such as aggregate views, clicks, outbound apply clicks, referral sources, approximate IP-derived locations, search appearances, featured placement performance, newsletter inclusion performance, and comparisons between featured and non-featured listing performance.

We do not provide Employers with the names, email addresses, or identities of candidates who browse, view, search, or click listings unless a candidate separately provides that information to the Employer or through a feature that clearly discloses such sharing.

Analytics and measurement data may be affected by ad blockers, browser settings, privacy tools, cookie restrictions, bot filtering, and technical limitations.

6. Cookie and Tracking Choices

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Blocking or deleting cookies may affect site functionality, authentication, analytics accuracy, and measurement.

Where required by applicable law, we will provide a way to opt out of sale or sharing of personal information, including through a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link or similar control.

Where required by applicable law, we honor browser-based opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control.

If we later intentionally target users in jurisdictions that require opt-in consent before setting non-essential cookies or pixels, we may implement a cookie banner or consent-management mechanism for those users.

7. Email Communications

If you subscribe to the FDE Jobs Brief, employer updates, candidate updates, launch updates, or similar communications, we will use your information to send those communications.

These communications may include:

• Job listings.
• Featured or sponsored listings.
• Employer highlights.
• Blog posts.
• Report excerpts.
• Market analysis.
• Salary, title, and skill trends.
• Product updates.
• Events, interviews, or related content.
• Employer posting opportunities.

You can unsubscribe from marketing or editorial emails at any time using the unsubscribe link in the email. We may still send non-marketing messages, such as account, billing, security, legal, or transactional notices where permitted by law.

8. AI-Assisted Features

The Service may offer AI-assisted features, including candidate conversational search, employer listing drafting, listing reformatting, role classification, and related functionality.

When you use AI-assisted features, we may process:

• Prompts.
• Draft listings.
• Search queries.
• Returned outputs.
• Session identifiers.
• Usage metadata.

AI-assisted features are used to provide the requested output and improve the operation, safety, and quality of the Service. Unless we update this Policy, prompts and outputs are not used to train, fine-tune, or evaluate third-party foundation models.

Candidate conversational search prompts are not intended to be linked to persistent candidate profiles. We may retain prompts and outputs for a limited period for safety, debugging, abuse prevention, and service improvement, as described in the retention section.

Do not submit sensitive, confidential, classified, export-controlled, or unauthorized information into AI-assisted features.

9. How We Share Personal Data

We may share personal data with the following categories of recipients.

9.1 Service Providers and Sub-processors

We use third-party providers to operate the Service. These may include:

• Vercel for hosting, edge delivery, security, and request logs.
• PropelAuth for Employer authentication.
• Stripe for payments, invoices, receipts, and billing.
• Palantir Foundry for backend storage, processing, authorization, audit logging, and AI-assisted features.
• beehiiv, Resend, or another email provider for subscription management and email delivery.
• Analytics and measurement providers, such as Google Analytics, Plausible, PostHog, Vercel Analytics, or similar providers.
• Advertising and retargeting providers, such as Google, LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, X, or similar providers.
• Customer support, CRM, sales, enrichment, and employer outreach tools, such as Apollo, Clay, Instantly, HubSpot, Gmail, LinkedIn, or similar providers.
• Security, logging, monitoring, and infrastructure providers.

These providers process personal data to help us operate, secure, measure, market, and improve the Service.

9.2 Employers

If you click an application link, you will leave the Service and interact directly with the Employer or its application provider.

Depending on the listing tier, we may report aggregate or listing-level analytics to Employers, such as views, clicks, apply-link clicks, approximate IP-derived locations, referral sources, search appearances, and newsletter performance.

We do not provide Employers with the identity of candidates who browse, search, view, or click listings unless the candidate separately discloses information to the Employer or we introduce a feature that clearly explains such sharing.

9.3 Public Disclosure

Listings are public. Listing content may be viewed, indexed, cached, copied, archived, or republished by search engines, AI systems, internet archives, users, or other third parties outside our control.

9.4 Legal, Safety, and Business Transfers

We may share personal data if we believe disclosure is reasonably necessary to:

• Comply with law, legal process, or lawful requests.
• Enforce our Terms.
• Protect rights, safety, security, and property.
• Detect or prevent fraud, abuse, or security incidents.
• Complete a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets.

10. Sale or Sharing of Personal Information

We do not sell personal information for money.

We may use third-party advertising and retargeting technologies to measure campaigns, build advertising audiences, and show ads for the Service on other websites or platforms. Depending on the technology used and the law that applies, this may be considered "sharing" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising or a "sale" of personal information, even though we do not receive money in exchange for the information.

Where required by applicable law, we will provide a way to opt out of such sale or sharing, including through a "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link or similar control. Where required, we will also honor browser-based opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control.

We do not knowingly sell or share personal information of anyone under 18.

11. Retention

We retain personal data for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law.

Retention periods may include:

• Employer account data: retained while the account is active and for a reasonable period thereafter for legal, security, audit, tax, and dispute purposes.
• Listings: retained while live and for a reasonable period thereafter for archival, analytics, audit, legal, and operational purposes. Public listings may persist in search engines or archives outside our control.
• Billing and tax records: retained as required by applicable tax, accounting, and legal obligations.
• Subscription data: retained while you remain subscribed and thereafter as needed to maintain suppression lists, prove consent, comply with email laws, and prevent re-subscription errors.
• Contact and support messages: retained as long as needed to respond and maintain appropriate records.
• Business outreach records: retained as long as reasonably needed for outreach, relationship management, opt-out management, legal compliance, and suppression records.
• Candidate conversational search prompts and outputs: retained for a limited period, unless needed longer for security, abuse prevention, debugging, legal compliance, or service improvement.
• Server logs and security logs:retained under our providers' standard retention periods or as needed for security and operational purposes.
• Analytics data: retained as needed for analytics, attribution, reporting, product improvement, legal compliance, or in aggregated or de-identified form for longer-term trend analysis.

When personal data is no longer needed, we delete, anonymize, or de-identify it where reasonably practicable.

12. De-identified and Aggregated Data

We may create de-identified, anonymized, or aggregated data from personal data and usage data. We may use such data for analytics, market reports, benchmarking, product improvement, public content, sales materials, and research, provided it does not identify you.

13. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal data, including access controls, encryption in transit, provider security controls, audit logging, and abuse prevention measures.

No method of transmission or storage is fully secure. If we become aware of a personal data breach requiring notice, we will provide notice as required by applicable law.

14. Children's Privacy

The Service is not directed to children. Employers must be at least 18 years old to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided personal data to us, contact privacy@ontologize.com and we will take appropriate steps to delete it.

15. California Privacy Rights

California residents may have rights under California privacy laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, if those laws apply to us.

Depending on your relationship with us and applicable law, these rights may include:

• The right to know what categories of personal information we collect, use, disclose, sell, or share.
• The right to access specific pieces of personal information.
• The right to delete personal information, subject to exceptions.
• The right to correct inaccurate personal information.
• The right to opt out of sale or sharing of personal information.
• The right to limit use of sensitive personal information where applicable.
• The right not to be discriminated against for exercising privacy rights.

Categories of personal information we may collect include identifiers, internet or other electronic network activity, commercial information, professional or employment-related information, user-generated content, inferences, and other information you provide or that is generated through use of the Service.

We collect these categories from you, your browser or device, Employers, public sources, and our service providers. We use and disclose them for the purposes described in this Policy.

To exercise privacy rights, contact privacy@ontologize.com. We may verify your identity through your account, email, or reasonable verification steps. You may authorize an agent to submit a request on your behalf where permitted by law.

To opt out of sale or sharing where applicable, use the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link or contact privacy@ontologize.com. Where required by applicable law, we honor Global Privacy Control signals.

16. Other U.S. State Privacy Rights

Residents of certain U.S. states may have additional privacy rights under applicable law. We will honor applicable rights where required and, where practicable, may extend similar rights to users regardless of state.

17. International Users

The Service is operated from the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, your personal data may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your jurisdiction.

We do not intentionally target users in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or other non-U.S. jurisdictions. If our practices change, we may update this Policy and implement additional measures as required.

18. Third-Party Sites

The Service links to Employer career pages, applicant tracking systems, payment processors, authentication providers, analytics providers, advertising providers, email providers, and other third-party sites or services. We do not control and are not responsible for the privacy practices, security, or content of third-party sites. Review their policies before submitting personal data.

19. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date indicates the most recent revision.

If we make material changes, we will provide notice by posting the updated Policy on the Service, providing an in-product notice, sending email notice where appropriate, or using another reasonable method.

20. Contact

Privacy inquiries, rights requests, and data requests should be sent to:

Ontologize Inc.
1225 Crane St, Menlo Park, CA 94025
USA
Email: privacy@ontologize.com