Product Engineer -- NextWork

Job Description

Job Description

Product Engineer — NextWork

Location: Austin, TX (Onsite, 5 days/week)
Compensation: $130,000 – $150,000 base + equity
Experience Level: 6–10 years (4–5 years considered for exceptional candidates)
Employment Type: Full-Time

About NextWork

NextWork is a project-based technical learning platform with more than 200,000 learners across 190+ countries. The platform is built around hands-on projects using modern AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, LangChain, and RAG systems. Learners automatically generate portfolio websites as they complete projects — creating real-world artifacts instead of certificates. Seed funded, recently relocated from New Zealand to Austin, with a team of approximately seven.

About the Role

This is a senior product engineering role with end-to-end ownership across user-facing features, backend systems, and core data model architecture. You will work closely with a small, fast-moving team and speak directly with users and community members to drive engineering decisions based on user outcomes and business impact.

What You'll Own

• Own user-facing problems end to end from design through production
• Build, ship, operate, and monitor product features
• Own and evolve backend systems for scalability, reliability, and performance
• Lead core data model architecture decisions
• Reduce technical debt and improve critical product paths
• Build tooling for content creation, project automation, validations, and documentation
• Collaborate closely with product, frontend, support, and growth teams
• Speak directly with users and community members
• Drive engineering decisions based on user outcomes and business impact

Requirements

• 6–10 years of professional engineering experience (4–5 years considered for exceptional candidates with outstanding progression)
• First or early engineer experience at a startup with demonstrated 0-to-1 ownership
• Ownership of a core product domain end to end
• Strong backend engineering experience
• Consistent career progression and increasing scope
• Experience identifying and solving problems independently
• Clear, measurable impact in previous roles
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity
• Recent startup experience
• Positive adoption of AI tools in daily workflow
• Austin-based or willing to relocate

Nice to Have

• RAG experience
• SEO awareness
• Graph-based data modeling
• Consumer or prosumer product experience
• Go, Node.js, or TypeScript experience
• EdTech, creator economy, or community platform experience

Target Backgrounds

Strong signals include early engineers at startups that successfully scaled, built products from zero to one, clear title and responsibility progression, strong product judgment and user empathy, cross-functional leadership, and AI-native workflow adoption. Ideal roles: Product Engineer, Senior Product Engineer, Founding Engineer, Backend Product Engineer, Full Stack Product Engineer, Consumer Product Engineer, or EdTech/Community Platform Engineer.

This Role Is NOT For

• Frequent job hoppers with multiple sub-12-month tenures
• Frontend-heavy "full stack" profiles without backend ownership
• Careers spent exclusively at large enterprises
• Consulting-heavy backgrounds without product ownership
• Infrastructure-only engineers with limited startup experience

Interview Process

1. Intro call with Natasha (Founder)
2. Technical interview (60–90 minutes) — real problem-solving, live coding with AI tools, whiteboard architecture; no LeetCode-style exercises
3. NextWork questionnaire
4. One-on-ones with Amber and team
5. Full-day Austin onsite
6. Offer

Logistics

• Role is fully onsite in Austin, TX — 5 days/week — please only apply if you can commit to this

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co. , the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of NextWork.