Founding Product Engineer- Forward Deployed

San Francisco or Washington, D.C. · In-Office

The next era of platform engineering isn't defined by faster incident response. It's defined by teams that stop reacting to production entirely.

Thoras is building agentic infrastructure that lets platform builders get ahead of the system, not chase it. We work in the most complex environments, with engineering teams for whom downtime is measured in dollars and reputations. If that mission doesn't light you up, this probably isn't the right role.

A Note from the Founders

We built Thoras because we lived the problem. Years spent inside complex infrastructure, watching brilliant platform teams spend their best energy reacting to systems instead of shaping them. The tooling wasn't good enough. The gap between business intent and engineering reality was too wide. We decided to close it.

We believe the next generation of infrastructure erases that divide entirely, where compute efficiency, platform stability, and rapid iteration are seamlessly intertwined. That is what we are building. And the teams who will define this category are the ones spending more time with customers than their competitors think is reasonable. That belief is baked into how we hire, how we build, and how we show up.

The person we're looking for isn't just technically sharp. They find genuine energy in a customer's hardest problems. They are curious about what AI makes possible and actively figuring that out, not waiting to be told. They want to be close to the work that matters most.

If that's you, we want to meet you.

Jen and Nilo Rahmani

This Role Is For You If

You are a product engineer with real platform and reliability depth. You build the core product and you can be trusted to own it in production, because you've done both. You're AI curious and actively working toward AI native: you don't wait for AI to be handed to you in a workflow, you reach for it, experiment with it, and think about how it changes what's possible in the systems you build and the customers you serve.

You are obsessed with customer work, or you are actively working toward that obsession, because you understand that the days of engineering without customers are gone. Not tolerating it. Not fitting it in around the engineering. Customer conversations are where you do some of your best thinking. You leave a debugging session with a customer energized, not drained. The best platform engineers today are the ones closest to the problem.

This Role Is Not For You If

You want to engineer like it's 2015, heads down, tickets in, customers someone else's problem. You want your role clearly scoped and handed to you. You want to work alongside customers occasionally rather than be embedded in their world every day. You need a mature eng org, clean processes, or a PM telling you what to build. You're more comfortable in a support lane than a builder lane. You optimize for comfort over growth.

If any of that sounds like you, we'd rather you know now.

How We Work

Customer Embedded

We operate inside our customers' world, building with proximity and speed around their workflows and goals as if they were our own. In this role that is literal: you are in their Slack, debugging with their engineers, and the shortest path from customer pain to shipped fix runs through you. Customers are not a part of this job. They are the job.

Extreme, Shared Ownership

We don't pass problems along. If it's broken, unclear, or off-track, you fix it or escalate it. Wins and misses both belong to the team.

Positive Intensity

Urgency, high standards, and optimism in every interaction. We create lift, not drag, especially under pressure.

Relentless Self-Improvement

We learn faster than the world changes. Discomfort is the standard.

We work in-office in SF or DC because the best thinking happens together.

What You'll Do

You'll own the architecture and reliability of the Thoras platform end to end: the backend systems and data models at its core, the frontend surfaces customers touch, the infrastructure layer underneath, and the agentic workflows that connect them.

The work moves in phases, not a constant even split. You go deep with a customer, then go heads-down to design and build what you learned, then back to the customer with it in hand. Both the customer time and the build time are the job, and you'll protect the focus the build half needs. You'll make real technical trade-offs, drive design decisions about what we build and not just how, mentor engineers, and keep momentum through ambiguity.

What We're Looking For

You've built core product, not just operated it. You've designed the data models and APIs other engineers build on, you're at home in a database, and you've shipped product surfaces that customers depend on, owning them from design through production.

You've shipped software that production environments depend on, across Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, containers, and the broader cloud-native stack. You've seen the failure modes that don't show up in tutorials. Go, modern frontend frameworks, AWS (EKS, VPC, IAM), and Linux are daily tools.

You have product judgment, not just engineering range: you can sit with a customer, decide what's worth building, and walk out with a filed issue and a fix already in progress.

How to Apply

Apply directly on LinkedIn + send an email to View email address on click.appcast.io with two things:

1. Why you're excited about this role
2. Why you're nervous about this role