Founding Product Engineer

Founding Product Engineer

This is a founding role at an early-stage company building a category that doesn't have a name yet. You will own systems that span detection, diagnosis, and developer experience, work directly with the founders, and decide what "excellent" looks like before anyone else does. If we get this right, you'll look back on this as the role where your slope changed. Here's what we're building.

Interfere is building the self-healing layer of the internet: software that detects broken product experiences, understands what caused them, and helps teams fix them before users notice. Modern teams have logs, dashboards, traces, and session replay. They still find out about too many problems from their users. We exist to close that gap for engineers, PMs, designers, and founders who care how their product actually works in the real world. The product surface is large. The category is still being defined. The people who join now will shape the standards and the operating system of the company. We've raised $5.1M from Y Combinator, Vercel Ventures, Hummingbird, Designer Fund, and others. We're in person in New York City.

You will own end-to-end features, from data model to interface, that define how the best teams understand and fix their products. You'll architect core systems, design the surfaces engineers actually use, and decide what "excellent" means for a category that doesn't exist yet.

What you'll build and own:

• Detection and diagnosis systems that reason about codebases and runtime behavior at scale
• Developer-facing interfaces that make complex system failures legible in seconds
• Pipelines that ingest, structure, and correlate billions of product events
• Agentic workflows that triage issues and propose or ship fixes safely
• APIs and integrations that meet developers inside the tools they already use
• The internal standards (for code, design, and judgment) that the next ten engineers will inherit

What we're looking for:

• You've shipped production software that real users depend on, end to end, across the stack.
• You move comfortably between frontend behavior, backend systems, and the seams between them.
• You can take an ambiguous product or infrastructure problem, define the next useful step, and ship without waiting for a fully specified plan.
• You can explain complex system behavior clearly enough that engineers, designers, and PMs can make the right decision quickly.
• You are willing to stay with hard problems long enough to understand them deeply, not just route around them.

Nice to have:

• You are fluent in TypeScript and modern web tooling (Next.js, React, Node).
• Worked on developer tools, observability, incident response, or session replay
• Built or operated systems handling high-throughput event data
• Shipped agentic or LLM-powered features into production
• Distributed systems depth, or strong eye for product and UI craft (either is a strong asset; both is rare and valuable)

Strong signals:

• A product, tool, or system you built that other engineers chose to use
• Open-source work, technical writing, or research with real depth
• Took on more scope than your title suggested at a previous company
• Started something from zero: a company, a team, a product line
• Picked up an unfamiliar domain quickly and shipped something good in it
• A portfolio piece (code, product, writing) where the taste is obvious in the first 30 seconds

We're in-person in New York City. We move quickly, write clearly, and expect high ownership. We care about the difference between something that works and something that is excellent. We expect you to push back when you disagree, and to do the work to be right when you do.

Compensation and logistics:

• Founding-team equity and competitive cash compensation (specific ranges shared in first conversation)
• Health, dental, and vision
• Visa sponsorship for exceptional international candidates
• We'll help you move to New York

Interview process:

1. Intro conversation with a founder
2. Technical deep-dive on past work
3. Paid project or pairing session on a real Interfere problem
4. Onsite with the team in New York
5. References and offer — we move fast and tell you where you stand

How to apply:

Send us your resume or LinkedIn, plus one piece of evidence we should look at: a repo, a live product, a technical essay, a side project, a postmortem. We want to see how you think and build. A short note on why Interfere helps, but the work matters more.