Deepinder Goyal, Zomato founder, is hiring engineers and scientists for his health-tech startup Temple, but with an unusual condition—applicants must have body fat under 16% (men) or 26% (women). Those who don’t meet the threshold can apply on a three-month probation. The post went viral, with social media split between admiration and amusement over the fitness-first hiring criteria.

Zomato founder and Eternal Vice Chairman Deepinder Goyal is putting together an engineering team for his health-tech startup Temple—and he wants people who can bench as hard as they can code. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Goyal announced hiring for a slew of deep-tech roles but made it clear that technical skills alone won’t cut it. Only candidates with body fat under 16% (men) or 26% (women) should apply. Those who don’t meet the fitness threshold yet still have a shot, but they’ll remain on probation until they get there within three months. “We are building for people who push their bodies to the edge. We want to be those people, not just serve them,” Goyal wrote.The roles on offer include Analog Systems Engineers, Embedded Systems Engineers, Computational Neuroscientists, BCI Engineers, Neural Decoding Researchers, Computer Vision Engineers, and Neuroimaging ML Engineers. Goyal also said he’s looking for product managers who can “work through Figma without needing a designer to hold their hand.”

Deepinder Goyal says Temple is building what ‘no other wearable’ currently measures

Goyal described Temple as “the ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes,” one that measures metrics no existing device tracks, “with a level of precision that doesn’t exist yet.” He said the ideal hires are “engineers who are also athletes” who would “wear what they build, and hate it until it’s perfect.”Goyal has been spotted wearing the Temple device—a small, metallic clip-like wearable that sits near the temple of the forehead—on multiple occasions, including during a podcast appearance earlier this year. He has previously described it as an experimental tool designed to measure brain blood flow in real time and continuously. The device grew out of his personal research into health optimisation and a theory he calls the “Gravity Ageing Hypothesis,” and is currently in the research prototype phase.

‘Body fat criteria before GTA 6,’ jokes internet

The hiring post predictably went viral, with social media split between admiration and disbelief. “I don’t think there exists an Embedded Systems Engineer with less than 16% body fat tbh,” one user quipped. Another wrote: “We really got body fat as a hiring criteria before GTA 6.”Some were more measured, noting that fitness-focused engineers might fall outside a rigid body fat number but still bring the right mindset. “Hiring based on body fat % may not be the best filter,” one commenter said. “Some great engineers who love fitness and train seriously may not fit that number, but they can still build amazing products.”