Posted 1 day ago
Founding Product Engineer
Job description
About the Role
We're a small, early-stage team building an AI-driven pricing and monetization platform for B2B companies — helping them move from static, one-off pricing exercises to a continuously improving, data-informed pricing lifecycle. Our platform spans scenario simulation, willingness-to-pay analysis, smart quoting, and real-time deal coaching.
As a Founding Product Engineer, you'll own entire product modules end-to-end — from scoping with customers through architecture, implementation, and iteration. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with leadership and customers, make key architectural decisions, and help establish engineering culture on a small team where every line of code matters. This is a highly hands-on, high-ownership role in San Francisco.
What You'll Do
- Own whole product modules end-to-end: scope requirements with customers, design versioned APIs, build the UI, ship to production, and iterate.
- Design and evolve architecture for agentic AI systems across Slack bots, terminal UIs, web interfaces, and vendor integrations.
- Ensure features are drivable by LLM agents via MCP/FastMCP server endpoints and conversational interfaces.
- Move pricing and business logic off the client into robust backend services to preserve financial fidelity.
- Extend and maintain a typed pricing ontology (Pydantic models for SKU, Proposition, Persona, Pricing, Customer, Contract, Quote, etc.).
- Lead technical discussions and architectural reviews to keep systems robust, extensible, and secure.
- Establish testing, observability, deployment, and performance monitoring practices for AI-driven features.
- Mentor peers, influence product strategy, and set engineering best practices and culture.
- Treat money-handling code as load-bearing infrastructure; prioritize root-cause analysis for production issues.
- Champion and continuously improve an AI-native SDLC where agents assist with code generation and automated review gates.
What We're Looking For
Required
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of owning and delivering entire product areas at startup or staff-level scope.
- Deep backend expertise: production experience with FastAPI, Python, and MongoDB (or a closely comparable stack).
- Credible full-stack range: ability to ship polished React + TypeScript UI components independently.
- Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous customer problems all the way to shipped features — without a dedicated PM.
- Experience designing REST or GraphQL APIs with clear contracts and versioning strategies.
- Experience building or integrating AI-assisted features and agent-driven workflows (LLM-driven interfaces, tool-calling endpoints, etc.).
- Familiarity with B2B SaaS monetization concepts: pricing models, packaging, quoting, or CPQ.
- High standards for correctness, especially in financial logic.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States — no visa sponsorship available.
Nice to Have
- Experience building MCP servers or tooling specifically for LLM agents.
- Background in billing, CPQ, metering, or pricing systems.
- Experience with data-dense frontend components and/or conversational interfaces.
- Familiarity with data residency requirements, SOC2/GDPR constraints, and compliant development practices.
- Prior experience as a technical founder, co-founder, or very early employee who shipped a 0-to-1 B2B product to paying customers.
Compensation & Benefits
- Salary: $200,000 – $250,000 USD per year
- Early-stage equity commensurate with a founding team role
- Opportunity to shape product strategy, engineering culture, and team growth from the ground up
Location
This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. Remote candidates will not be considered. We believe in-person collaboration is core to how we build at this stage.
Skills and functions
- Python
- React
- Software Engineering
- Typescript