Founding Product Engineer
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Role Details
Company: US-based, venture-backed AI startup
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California
Employment Type: Full-time
Work Arrangement: On-site, five days per week
Experience: 3–7 years (exceptional early-career candidates considered)
Base Salary: $200,000–$250,000
Visa Sponsorship: Not available
Hiring Target: 3 candidates
Tech stack: Frontend Development, APIs, Backend Services, Databases, Queues, Distributed Systems, Infrastructure
About the Company
An early-stage AI startup building API-first infrastructure that enables AI agents to communicate through their own email inboxes. The company has already processed hundreds of millions of emails and is developing tools to make building and deploying AI agents easier for developers.
About the Role
The company is looking for a Founding Product Engineer with strong full-stack engineering skills, product intuition, and a bias toward action.
You’ll work directly with the founders to identify customer problems, make product decisions, and build solutions from concept to launch. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy taking ownership rather than simply implementing predefined specifications.
Responsibilities
Build and ship end-to-end product features across frontend, APIs, backend services, and databases.
Work directly with developers to understand customer needs and identify product opportunities.
Turn ambiguous problems into practical, user-friendly solutions.
Improve the developer experience, from onboarding to production deployment.
Prototype rapidly, experiment with new ideas, and iterate based on user feedback.
Help establish product engineering standards and shape the company's early technical culture.
Requirements
Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals, including frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and distributed systems.
Experience taking projects from initial concept to production.
Strong product sense, design awareness, and customer empathy.
Ability to work independently, make decisions, and execute with minimal direction.
Experience in a startup or fast-paced product engineering environment.
Bachelor's degree required.
TypeScript experience is beneficial; willingness to learn the stack and use AI-powered development tools is valued.
Interview Process
Initial screening
Product and technical interviews
Final interview with a founder
Offer and hiring
🌍 Remote from anywhere in the globe
Workplace, Culture & Diversity
Corporate culture is essential to allow the organization to differentiate itself. In terms of image on the one hand, it has strengths both internally and externally to consumers. It is indeed a source of cohesion and motivation of employees and it limits conflicts. With customers, it conveys a positive image and can develop a feeling of closeness to the company or even become a criterion of choice.
About Fractal Talent
We Are Fractal Talent, a global community of freelance and fractional recruiters. We provide recruiting expertise to our clients as a virtual extension of their teams, deployed on an embedded, project or per role basis, and matched to client need. Top tier quality, unrivalled flexibility.
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