Builder

Job Description

Job Description

About Mashgin

Mashgin powers the world's best checkout experience for over 40 million users. Customers just place their items on our kiosks and our AI rings up their entire order in less than a second. With Mashgin, lines are now optional.

Mashgin's technology powers over 1 billion transactions at your favorite locations, including over half of all US professional sports teams, 4,000 convenience stores, major airports, universities, and more.

We’re not just building cutting-edge AI—we’re creating real-world impact and unforgettable experiences. Backed by a well-funded Series B, we’re also one of the rare AI startups that’s already profitable.

Our secret? A culture of extreme ownership, autonomy, and customer obsession. At Mashgin, we are building something extraordinary by challenging conventional wisdom. We’ve thrown out the old rules to focus on what truly matters: creating a kickass product that makes people say, 'Wow'. We don’t care about short-term wins; we build systems that stand the test of time. If you thrive in a culture of excellence without compromise and want to see your work have an immediate, remarkable impact, you’re in the right place.

Position Summary

This is not a specialized position. We're hiring Builders — people who can wear every hat and ship products that blow people's minds.

Most companies split this across five roles: a PM to decide what to build, a designer to figure out how it looks, a frontend engineer, a backend engineer, and someone to handle support when it breaks. We don't do that. At Mashgin, one person owns the whole thing — from talking to a stadium operations manager about their pain points, to sketching a solution, to writing the code that runs on thousands of kiosks, to watching real users interact with it and iterating until it's right.

You'll work across our entire stack: the computer vision models running on-device, the kiosk UI that a customer touches, the cloud infrastructure processing a million transactions a day, the dashboards operators use to manage their locations. You'll use AI tools to move at 10x speed, but you'll understand what's happening under the hood.

If you could credibly start a company tomorrow and do every job yourself — engineering, design, product, support — you're the kind of person we're looking for.

We maintain a flat, high-impact engineering culture where every engineer who joins our team carries the title of Member of Technical Staff.

Where We Need Builders Today

Reporting & Management Application . Own the application our customers use to understand their business — reporting dashboards, transaction analytics, location management, and operational tools. This requires a deep understanding of data, visualization, and customer processes. You'll need to get inside the heads of stadium operators, c-store managers, and university dining directors to understand what numbers matter to them and how to surface insights that drive real decisions. Not just charts — the whole product experience around the data.

Creator (Menu Management UI) . Own Creator, our menu management platform — the tool operators use to configure what their kiosks recognize, how items are priced, and how menus are organized. This is an incredibly complex workflow (think: thousands of SKUs, regional variations, seasonal rotations, tax rules, modifier chains) that needs to feel simple to a normal human end user. If you love the challenge of taking gnarly domain complexity and making it disappear behind an interface that a non-technical operator can use without training, this is your role.

• Impact : You will own significant responsibility and have total ownership over your work. We stay lean and efficient, so your work directly impacts the product we ship every day.
• Simplicity : Complexity is a waste of time here—we take pride in building things that just work.
• Hard Work : Forget the glamorous research papers. We prioritize the hard work it takes to achieve real-world clarity and accuracy. You will innovate relentlessly to push the boundaries of what’s possible in visual automation.
• Humility : No task is beneath you. Whether it's high-level architecture or grunt work to fix a bug, we check our egos at the door and get real work done.
• Ruthless Prioritization : If everything is on fire, nothing is. You will be expected to prioritize ruthlessly, cutting through distractions to focus on the most impactful product improvements.
• Customer Innovation : We are customer-centric, not customer-pleasing. You won’t bend to every client demand; you will let innovation drive the product forward to solve the real problems our users face.
• Efficiency : Meetings suck. We keep them short and only use them for alignment, giving you your time back to focus on real work.

• Own products, not tickets. Take a problem from "we heard this from customers" to "it's live in 4,000 locations." You decide what to build, how to build it, and when to ship. You'll work directly with the founders on product development from end to end.
• Talk to customers. Visit kiosk deployments, sit with operators, watch transactions happen, and understand pain points firsthand — not through a requirements doc.
• Design the experience. Sketch UIs, prototype interactions, and make product decisions. You don't need to be a trained designer, but you need taste and empathy for the person standing at the kiosk.
• Build simple MVPs and ship them quickly from 0 to 1. Dream up new architecture to solve challenging problems. Rethink and recreate existing codebases for scale.
• Write great code. Full-stack: React/TypeScript for kiosk UIs and dashboards, Python for backend services and ML pipelines, C++ for on-device inference. You don't need all of these today, but you need to be comfortable learning new languages, libraries, and frameworks when the solution calls for it.
• Build with AI. Use LLMs, copilots, and AI development tools to move at 10x speed. Understand how to leverage AI models in production — not just as toys. You get an unlimited token budget as long as you keep shipping great work.
• Solve hard problems at the intersection of hardware and software. Work with a small interdisciplinary team in hardware, software, and design to build new versions of products from scratch. Deal with edge cases that only happen in a stadium during the 7th-inning stretch. Make systems that recover gracefully.
• Support what you ship. When something breaks at a customer site, you feel it. Continuously improve and maintain code that's already in production.

• You're a builder at heart. You'd be building software even if nobody paid you. You have side projects, open source contributions, or a startup in your past (or future).
• You're deeply technical. 5+ years shipping production software. Excellent knowledge of one or more of: Python, Node.js, C++, Go, C#, Java. Experience building production-ready code that's used regularly by lots of people.
• You think like a product person. You don't just ask "how should I build this?" — you ask "should we build this at all?" and "what would make this 10x better for the user?"
• You have taste. You care about the details — the animation speed, the error message copy, the API naming convention. Craft matters.
• You move fast. You bias toward action. Ship MVPs, get feedback, iterate. You'd rather have something in front of users in a week than a perfect spec in a month.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity. We won't hand you a fully-specced PRD. You'll figure out what the right thing to build is, often with incomplete information.
• You use AI as a multiplier. You're fluent with AI-assisted development tools and understand how to use LLMs to accelerate your workflow — from code generation to prototyping to analysis.
• You can go start a company. This is the litmus test. If you could credibly do every job at a startup — engineering, design, product, customer support — you're the kind of person we're looking for.

• Experience in a fast-paced work environment, shipping quality code quickly and iterating
• Comfortable with deploying and managing cloud infrastructure
• Experience with computer vision, deep learning, or ML systems in production
• Experience building software that interfaces with hardware (IoT, embedded, kiosks, robotics)
• Experience in retail, payments, or point-of-sale systems
• Founding engineer or early startup experience

• An opportunity to work on a small, multidisciplinary team with the potential to break new ground in many different industries
• Excellent health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• 401k plan
• Flexible PTO policy
• Catered lunch in office with fully stocked snacks and beverages
• Pet insurance for your fur babies
• Voluntary life insurance plan
• Competitive salary and options in a small, rapidly scaling company

For roles based in Palo Alto, CA, the overall market range for Mashgin is typically $185,000 - $275,000 USD annually. Note that total compensation for this position will be determined by candidate’s relevant qualifications, work experience, skills, and other relevant factors. This estimate excludes the value of any benefits offered by Mashgin, and the potential future value of any other long-term incentives.

Mashgin is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Individuals seeking employment at Mashgin are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation. 

Notice on fraudulent jobs

We have been made aware of instances of fraudulent job postings and/or fraudulent recruiting activity by bad actors, claiming to represent Mashgin. These fraudulent schemes often seek monetary contributions or payments from job seekers (such as for "start up costs" or "equipment"), or seek to collect sensitive personal or banking information from job seekers. These job postings and offers are not authorized by Mashgin, and Mashgin is not responsible for fraudulent offers or requests for personal information or payments. Mashgin will never ask for any financial commitment or contribution from a candidate at any stage of the recruitment process. Candidates who have questions about the validity of Mashgin job postings or offers should consult the job postings on our mashgin.com career site. If you think you've been scammed, please reference this site for more information.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.