Puvio
Senior Backend Engineer · ex-Twilio · Seattle. Severance clock running. The portal was not going to hire him back.
The week of
Daniel Cho had been at Twilio in Seattle for four years on messaging infrastructure. Senior Engineer. On-call. The February cut was not a performance story. It was a slide with a percentage.
He updated LinkedIn to Open to Work before lunch. Then he did what every thread told him to do. Easy Apply until the list looked like effort. Eighteen rows by Friday. Two “thanks for applying.” Sixteen nothing.
The résumé was the same PDF he had used internally. The problem was not the PDF. Nobody on those teams knew his name.
The board
A former teammate sent him Puvio. He uploaded the résumé once. The record already had the on-call work and the latency project he would have forgotten to mention by April.
He pasted five postings. Fit against that record. Two roles were a stretch he would have applied to anyway because panic likes volume. He archived them. That felt like quitting. It was the first useful decision of the week.
On the three that stayed, plus two more he added later, the card already had company research and ranked alumni. School matches from UW on two cards. He did not build a spreadsheet of emails.
The notes
He almost led with “I was impacted.” Everyone leads with that in February. The draft from Quick Message put the shared school first, then one line of his record against what they had shipped, then a small ask.
He edited the layoff into a single clause so it was honest and not the point. Cloudflare note cited a blog post on their network edge that was already on the card. Snowflake note tied his streaming work to a posting line on ingestion. He copied both into LinkedIn himself. No login into Puvio. No auto-send.
Two replies. One polite no. One screening. He still submitted the portal when they asked. The difference was a human had already read a note that used his actual work.
“Easy Apply was how I proved I was panicking. The five notes were how I used the years I had already worked.”
Daniel’s résumé did not change in the week after the cut. The path did. He stopped feeding portals and started sending homework built from a record he already had.