They changed the wording on their hiring page at https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html. Quick look at older snapshots I found it

> Our ambition is enormous, going against industry giants with a very small team. You will work a lot. We are completely user funded. Kagi is currently used by one town worth of people. Do not expect VC backed/big-tech salary. Do expect equity as a part of compensation

It doesn’t sound good, but maybe they mean it in a more benign way, like, “We don’t have the funds to hire people who expect to twiddle their thumbs and get paid for it the way their over-funded VC peers do.”

In other words, maybe they’re saying they don’t have any BS jobs like Meta and Google seem to have.

A small team can’t waste time on interviews of people who won’t take the pay.

Google’s HR review team that reviews the team that reviews interview processes is probably larger than Kagi.

the wierd part to to me is they expect you to spend 2 weeks on a take home coding assignment, then maybe if you pass, tell you the max they pay is 100k a year.

"ruthless communication habits" tells you all you need to know, and this is exactly why you'd put something like this into your job ad.

This could mean many different things. Like communicating well, documenting things to what you are probably assuming: answering your messages 24 hours a day instantly.

I doubt you can get a feeling for the work / life balance from this half sentence.