Staff/Principal Product Engineer

Client is a New York City-based Series A startup building advanced AI sales and support agents for the real estate industry. As a Staff/Principal Product Engineer, you will own problems end to end: talking to customers, digging into the data, deciding what's worth building, and then building it yourself. This is not a product management role, and it is not a frontend role. You will spend your time in discovery and in the codebase, shipping proofs of concept and MVPs that prove out whether an idea deserves to become part of the core product. Our core product is our agents, our harness, and the agentic workflows that run on them, so this is deep systems and AI work.

This role reports to the Head of Product and sits alongside our platform engineering team. If you would rather own the long-term architecture and scaling of the core platform than chase new product bets, look at our Staff/Principal Software Engineer opening instead.

Responsibilities

• Own the full arc of a product bet: research and discovery, customer and data analysis, scoping, then building the proof of concept or MVP yourself.
• Work directly with customers and the go-to-market team to understand where our agents fall short and what would move the needle.
• Design and build agentic workflows, agent harness improvements, tool integrations, and the backend systems behind them.
• Make the call on what to build, what to cut, and what to kill, backed by evidence rather than opinion.
• Hand off proven prototypes to the platform engineering team, or productionize them yourself when that's the faster path.
• Set the bar for how we evaluate agent quality: evals, instrumentation, and the metrics that tell us whether something actually works.
• Collaborate directly with the Head of Product and the founders on product direction and technical strategy.
• Debug and solve problems across the stack, no "not my job" mentality.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 8+ years building and shipping production software, with a track record of owning products end to end rather than executing specs.
• Experience as a founder, founding engineer, or product engineer at an early-stage company, where you were responsible for both the "what" and the "how."
• Strong backend engineering skills, with Python and TypeScript experience.
• Full stack capability. You can build a working interface when a prototype needs one, even though this role is not primarily frontend or UI/UX work.
• Comfort with ambiguity: able to take a vague business problem, define it, and come back with something running.
• Experience with LLM-based systems, agents, or agentic workflows in production.
• Experience with AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code.
• Based in or able to work hybrid from New York City or London.
• Fluency in English is required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building vertical AI products, ideally in real estate, proptech, or another operations-heavy industry.
• Experience with AWS technologies.
• Experience with voice, SMS, or email infrastructure.
• Comfort presenting to customers and partners, and communicating data-driven arguments to a business audience.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for non-deterministic systems.

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary with equity options
• Medical, Dental and Vision premiums covered at 100%
• Snacks, a generous tech budget, unlimited vacation, and company outings