You need to get out. "Are you hiring?" Everyone is hiring. Especially in SF. You have absolutely no reason to stay at a "job" that isn't both compensating you e

You need to get out. "Are you hiring?" Everyone is hiring. Especially in SF. You have absolutely no reason to stay at a "job" that isn't both compensating you extremely well and respecting you, and this one is doing neither. And don't worry about dooming the company. You owe them absolutely nothing. Zero. Well, negative, since they owe you a lot. If the company thinks it can get by with a single unpaid engineer, they're not going very far anyway, and this will be a good wake-up call that they need to re-evaluate their priorities. If you really can't keep yourself from feeling bad about leaving them, offer to work for market rate (something like $100/hour as a consultant) for a little while so you can finish up the product and give them some time to find someone else, but don't work another day for them without knowing that you'll be immediately compensated. And set a hard deadline, like 30 days, for when you're out of there, because you shouldn't stay anywhere that doesn't respect you for too long even if they are paying you. And yes, technical interviews around here are pretty tough, but the only way to see if you can make it through is to try a few. It sounds like you're smart enough to do very well at them. Shameless plug time: I interned at Cloudera this summer. I had a great time and learned a ton. The people there are extremely smart. A huge proportion of the company are engineers, and pretty much all of the management is highly technical. They'd be very interested in talking to someone who hacks on NoSQL databases and is active in ML research. I could see you on the platform team, contributing to HBase and/or Mahout, and there are some Data Science and Solution Architect roles that could involve your ML experience. Here's the careers page: http://www.cloudera.com/company/careers/ http://www.cloudera.com/company/careers/