Meet the Founders

Hunter Samuels

Founder, Genius & Chief Technology Officer

Hunter didn't originally set out to start a career technology company. He was trying to solve his own job search.

A technology and transformation leader by background, Hunter did what comes naturally to a builder when he encountered an inefficient system: he started taking it apart to understand how it worked. The desktop application he created for himself eventually grew into Roleworthy and became the technical foundation for LAYIQ.

Building it required Hunter to venture into technologies and disciplines that were often new to him. He moved from a simple local application to web infrastructure, large-scale structured job data, production environments and mobile applications while increasingly incorporating AI-assisted development into how he researches, designs, builds, tests and reviews the platform. There were wrong turns, rewrites and plenty of lessons learned the hard way, all of which helped shape the product that exists today.

Perhaps the most important lesson was that more technology, more data and more job listings don't necessarily produce better career decisions. The difficult—and interesting—problem is identifying the signals that matter to a particular person and making those signals understandable.

Today, Hunter leads LAYIQ's technology and product architecture while continuing to pursue the question that started the whole thing: Which roles are actually worth your time—and why?

John Shepard

Co-Founder, Troublemaker & President

John came to LAYIQ from a different direction. After decades leading large, complex technology organizations, building global teams, recruiting talent and developing leaders, he'd spent much of his career thinking about people and potential: how organizations find the right talent, how individuals find places where they can thrive, and why those two things so often fail to connect.

He had also navigated the system as a candidate himself and knew that experience and capability don't always fit neatly into a job title or résumé. As careers become more senior and more varied, the things that make someone right for an opportunity can become even harder to capture through conventional search and matching.

When Hunter showed John what he'd built and invited him to join the company, John saw an opportunity to take the underlying idea further. Their conversations expanded from finding better-fitting jobs to understanding the larger arc of someone's career—where they've been, what they've accomplished and learned, what they're capable of, and where they want to go next.

John helped shape that expanded vision, the LAYIQ identity, and many of the experiences now being built into the platform. Today, he focuses on company strategy, candidate experience, partnerships and growth, with the longer-term goal of building LAYIQ into a trusted career platform that remains useful long after someone's next job search ends. Like Hunter, he's helping build something he wishes had existed when he needed it.