Product Engineer (Full-Stack, Frontend-Leaning)

Job Description

Job Description

Product Engineer (Full-Stack, Frontend-Leaning)

Location: New York City (on-site in the office, relocation supported)

Compensation: USD $170,000 – $220,000 + Equity

Hiring: Up to 2 engineers

Company: Confidential (represented by Worthland)

About the Project

Our client is a fast-growing, AI-native startup rethinking how a traditionally manual, relationship-driven industry operates at scale. With strong product–market fit, rapid growth, and backing from top-tier investors, the team is building a durable marketplace where AI and product design are core to how the business runs.

The product is used daily by power users who rely on it as their primary workflow tool. Speed, clarity, and UX quality matter. This is not a side project or internal tool—it is the company’s core product.

The Role

As a Product Engineer, you will own the primary user-facing product end-to-end. You will work directly with the founder to decide what to build and why , not just how to implement specs.

This is a true product engineering role : high ownership, frequent user feedback, fast iteration, and a strong frontend and UX focus, while still owning the full stack.

There is no separate product manager layer. You are expected to think in terms of users, workflows, and outcomes , not tickets.

What You’ll Work On

Core Product (Primary Focus)

• Design and build end-to-end product flows for a complex, high-usage dashboard
• Talk directly with users to understand real workflows, pain points, and edge cases
• Redesign and iterate on core flows to reduce friction and improve speed and clarity
• Own the overall product experience, from UX details to performance and reliability

Product Iteration & Expansion

• Improve discovery, filtering, and organization of complex information
• Build intuitive views that surface what matters without overwhelming users
• Take on greenfield work as new product surfaces, user types, and verticals are introduced

Intelligence & AI-Powered Features

• Collaborate closely with an Applied AI Engineer to integrate AI-powered features into the product
• Build UI and product experiences around AI outputs (summaries, scoring, recommendations)
• Focus on making AI understandable, trustworthy, and useful for real users

Growth & Product Quality

• Contribute to growth-oriented features across activation, engagement, retention, and monetization
• Ship polished, high-quality features with strong attention to interaction details
• Balance speed of shipping with long-term product quality and maintainability

What Success Looks Like

• Users feel the product is faster, clearer, and easier to use because of what you ship
• Core workflows become simpler and more efficient
• Product decisions are driven by real user behavior, not assumptions
• You are trusted as a product and engineering owner, not just an executor

Requirements

Must-Have

• 4+ years of experience building full-stack products end-to-end
• Strong frontend and product sensibility, with solid backend fundamentals
• Proven experience owning a product surface or workflow, not just isolated features
• Comfort working in fast-moving, low-process environments
• Strong communication and willingness to engage directly with users

Strong Plus

• Experience at an early-stage or high-growth product company
• Background building tools for power users (dashboards, CRMs, internal tools)
• Experience collaborating closely with founders
• Interest in AI-powered products, even if not an AI specialist

Not a Fit If You Prefer

• Highly scoped tickets with detailed specs
• Minimal user interaction
• Narrow frontend-only or backend-only ownership
• Large, highly structured organizations with slow iteration cycles

Why This Role

• High ownership over a core product used daily
• Direct access to the founder and real decision-making influence
• Opportunity to shape product direction, not just implement it
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and long-term upside

Interview Process

• Intro Call (30 minutes): High-level screening to assess product mindset, ownership, and mutual interest in the company, role, and stage.
• Technical Interview (60 minutes): Open-ended product challenge focused on problem framing, solution design, and tradeoff thinking rather than algorithm trivia.
• Behavioral Deep Dive (60 minutes): Discussion of background, values, user empathy, and how the candidate operates in ambiguous, founder-led environments.
• On-Site (Full Day): Work through real product problems together in person to evaluate collaboration style, decision-making, and end-to-end product thinking.

First 30 Days: What Success Looks Like

Week 1

• Talk directly with recruiters and observe how they actually use the product day-to-day
• Dig into real pipelines and workflows to understand pain points and friction
• Identify the biggest usability and efficiency gaps
• Align with the founder on 1–2 high-leverage areas to focus on first

Weeks 2–4

• Ship meaningful improvements in those focus areas (new features, UX fixes, simplified flows)
• Remove friction from core workflows and improve speed and clarity for users
• Begin owning the product roadmap, using the founder as a thought partner rather than a project manager

What We Look For (Strong Signals)

• Founding or early engineer at a seed / Series A startup who built core product and talked to customers regularly
• Technical founder with clear 0→1 experience and strong customer obsession (regardless of startup outcome)
• Product engineer from a product-led growth environment (e.g., Figma-, Notion-, Vercel-style teams) with strong craft and UX sensibility
• Forward Deployed Engineer–type profiles: high agency, customer-facing, and comfortable figuring out what to build on the fly
• Has launched something meaningful from 0→1 (startup, internal product, or substantial side project)
• Can clearly explain what they built, why they built it, and the tradeoffs involved
• Comfortable operating without dedicated PMs or with very light product support
• Proactively identifies problems and proposes solutions instead of waiting for tasks
• Has spoken directly with users and changed what they built based on feedback
• Can point to shipped features that moved a real business metric (activation, conversion, retention, or revenue)

Not a Fit If You Prefer

• Pure backend or infrastructure roles with little exposure to product or users
• Frontend work limited to executing designs without product input
• Highly structured environments with detailed specs and heavy PM ownership
• Being assigned tasks rather than owning problems end-to-end
• Inability to explain the business or user impact of past work
• Needing fully defined requirements before starting and discomfort with changing priorities