Product Engineer

Product Engineer AI Systems

Full-Time On-Site (Flatiron, NYC)

$140K- $170K + Up to 0.50% Equity

Step into a ground-floor engineering role at a fast-growing startup transforming the way state and local governments deliver public services. This team is nine months into building next-generation AI systems that replace outdated mainframes, paper-heavy workflows, and inefficient legacy processes. If you want to build software that has a real-world impact and see your work deployed in the hands of public officials, this role puts you at the center of it.

Why This Role Matters

Join a rapid-growth team already seeing strong revenue traction.

Work directly with the founder to deliver AI-driven products from concept demo production.

Help modernize essential government systems used by millions of people.

Shape core internal tooling and pipeline orchestration behind advanced AI workflows.

Take a true ownership role in a small, tight-knit engineering team located in NYC.

Rare early-stage opportunity to influence both the product and the engineering culture.

What You'll Do

You'll wear two critical hats:

1. Build user-friendly, reliable software for government officials

Replace outdated, paper-based, and mainframe processes with intuitive, modern tools.

Partner closely with non-technical government users to understand workflows and ship solutions that actually fit their real-world needs.

2. Own internal tooling and AI pipeline orchestration

Architect and maintain internal systems that coordinate complex, multi-step AI agents and workflows.

Build demo-ready, full-stack applications that move quickly from prototype to production.

Create high-quality internal tools used by analysts, support staff, caseworkers, and other humans in the loop.

You'll Thrive Here If You Are

Entrepreneurial

Think like a founder: What is the real product need here?

Comfortable with ambiguity and operating without fully specified tickets.

Enjoy talking to non-technical users and turning messy processes into simple software.

Fast at Building

Able to move from idea to prototype to working demo quickly.

Strong at feedback loops, UX flow, sample data setups, and iteration.

Ruthless at prioritizing scope and shipping fast.

Ops-Oriented

Think in terms of systems, queues, retries, monitoring, and scaling.

Comfortable managing pipelines that may run thousands of times per day.

Enjoy building internal tools just as much as customer-facing features.

What Were Looking For

Must-Haves

Strong project history demonstrating end-to-end ownership.

Fluency in backend engineering (Python or Node) and modern frontend tools (React, TailwindCSS, similar).

Experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Factory, Codex, Gemini CLI, etc.).

Ability to spin up small full-stack apps: API, data model, UI, deployment.

US work authorization and US citizenship.

Ability to work in-person 5 days/week in Flatiron, NYC.

Nice-to-Haves

Startup or founding engineer experience.

Familiarity with long-running workflows, background workers, queues, or agentic AI orchestration.

Comfort speaking with customers and joining live demos.

What This Role Is Not

Not a pure frontend role; this is full-stack with meaningful backend responsibilities.

Not a big-company environment with long roadmaps,  expect fast context switching and a lot of ownership.

Compensation & Details

Salary: $140K - $170K

Equity: Up to 0.50%

Visa Sponsorship: Not available

Work Model: Full-time, on-site (5 days/week)

Location: Flatiron, New York City

Tech Stack: Next.js; Python ; Tailwind CSS

Interview Process

Case study/project discussion with the hiring manager

Technical interview (optional)

On-site interview + scoped work trial (34 hours)