Jack & Jill: the startup kickstarting the world of work with AI agents

Startup Jack & Jill is building AI agents for the job market. Jack talks to people about their careers. Jill helps companies find the right talent. When Jack and Jill agree there is a match, they introduce the two people directly, skipping the application altogether.

Today, more than 380,000 people are talking to Jack and 5,000+ companies are hiring with Jill, with 5,000+ interviews arranged every month. AWS gives Jack & Jill the flexibility to support thousands of simultaneous voice conversations and scale quickly with demand, allowing the team to focus on making the product better for candidates and hiring teams.

Jack & Jill was founded on a bold vision: to build a job market where everyone has an agent in their corner, helping people find remarkable work and companies find remarkable people. Bringing that vision to life at scale requires infrastructure that can grow with it. With AWS, Jack & Jill has been able to scale from an early-stage startup to a platform used by hundreds of thousands of people.

Until now, recruitment has forced a choice between scale and understanding. Job boards and LinkedIn bring volume, but leave people to do the heavy lifting. Great recruiters bring judgment, context, and a personal touch, but can only represent a limited number of people at once.

Companies face the same challenge from the other side. The right person for a role may be out there, but finding them is far harder than it should be. As a result, remarkable people and opportunities pass each other every day.

Scaling on AWS

Delivering on such a daring vision needed infrastructure that could scale, flex, and stay reliable as it grew. Choosing the right infrastructure was critical as Jack & Jill prepared to scale. “We started off with a very quick prototype and hacked a bunch of things together, as a lot of startups do,” says Mehan. “There came a point where we were thinking, how do we make this a proper system that's going to scale?”

When Jack & Jill was ready to move from prototype to production, the team needed infrastructure it could build on without slowing down. "It was familiar, easy to use, and pretty easy to get started on," says Mehan. AWS also gave the company access to support as it encountered the infrastructure challenges that came with rapid growth.

Voice was a particularly demanding part of the platform. “Voice is a new paradigm,” says Mehan, “and whenever you have a new paradigm, there needs to be a new way of managing that infrastructure.” Jack & Jill runs thousands of simultaneous voice conversations, alongside interactions through chat, WhatsApp, and email. As the voice ecosystem developed, the company was able to adapt its infrastructure. “One of the nice things about being on AWS was that we were able to mature our voice solutions with how the industry itself was maturing,” says Mehan. “We were able to switch from various different infrastructure solutions throughout AWS as it became clearer what the best practices were going to be for hosting thousands of simultaneous voice conversations.”

Meeting demand

Jack & Jill was able to further develop its solution with support from AWS, including launching a new sourcing feature. The feature enables hiring managers and talent teams to search across a pool of more than one billion candidates, creating significant AI inference and throughput requirements.

The launch generated more demand than the startup expected. “We didn't have enough AI inference on our existing provider,” says Mehan. Jack & Jill contacted its AWS account team and, says Mehan, “within five minutes, they got back to us, helped us increase our rate limits, and helped us scale to the demand of our users.”

For Jack & Jill, the difference was significant. Instead of a launch-day outage caused by unexpected demand, the company was able to keep the product available as users increased. “The story from that launch could have been Jack & Jill had a big outage, a bunch of people tried it, and it didn't work,” says Mehan. “Instead, the story from that launch for us was that when Jack & Jill released this crazy new product, it went viral, and people loved it.”

Navigating challenges

For Jack & Jill, the benefits of working with AWS extend beyond infrastructure. “One of the biggest things for us was just how hands-on and responsive the team was,” says Mehan.  “AWS is in our Slack,” says Mehan. “I can shoot them a message and within five minutes they respond, and not just respond, but respond with meaningful things.”

He shares the example of a query regarding an AWS solution. The AWS team connected Jack & Jill with the relevant product manager, shared insight into the product roadmap, and provided proactive updates. This close working relationship is helping Jack & Jill as it continues to build its solution, “There will be problems on the way, there will be outages, there will be things that don't work, there will be things we try which fail,” says Mehan. “Having partners you can rely on is super important during those times and I think AWS has been a great partner on that journey with us.”

Building for what's next

In its earliest days, Jack & Jill used AWS Activate Credits to cover the cost of running thousands of voice conversations before revenue could keep pace. "They allow you to just get started, get building, get a product into people's hands, and understand if your business is going to work," says Mehan.

That runway, combined with hands-on support from the AWS team, allowed Jack & Jill to focus on building a better product rather than managing infrastructure costs.

Today, more than 380,000 people in San Francisco, New York, and London are talking to Jack about what they want in their careers, and more than 5,000 companies are hiring with Jill, with the platform now arranging around 5,000 interviews every month.

Jack & Jill also raised $60 million in total funding to continue building toward its vision. "AWS allows us to innovate and to continue to push the boundaries of what's possible," says Mehan.