Founding Engineering Lead, Product.ai
$550-700k
OTE
$340-420k
BASE
More information about location
Office located in Santa Monica, LA
Verification layer for AI commerce
Job no longer available
Verification layer for AI commerce
21-100 employees
Job no longer available
$550-700k
OTE
$340-420k
BASE
More information about location
Office located in Santa Monica, LA
21-100 employees
Company mission
To separate genuine product knowledge from the flood of AI-generated marketing noise now dominating the internet.
Role
Who you are
- You reason from a system's failure modes and the company's goals at the same time. Handed an unfamiliar service and a strategy question, you can say what breaks first and what to build first, and defend both under questioning. You are an engineer who is also articulate: the memo you write is the meeting, and people act on it. You form a working model fast, notice when it's wrong, and update in the open
- You treat agents as tools you verify, never oracles you trust. You can still do the work by hand: trace a regression, design a gate, prove an invariant holds under a case you constructed yourself. That mastery is what lets you read what an agent produced and say why it's right, or refuse to ship it, and it is what gives your strategy weight with engineers who do the same every day
- You've probably been the most technical person in a leadership room and the most strategic person in an engineering room: a CTO or VP of Engineering at a small company who never stopped building, a staff or principal engineer who wrote the technical strategy their organization followed, or a technical founder who shipped the product and made the calls. We care about the artifact and the reasoning more than the title you held
What the job involves
- Agents write much of the code here now, and it ships only because deterministic gates, checks written as software, decide what an agent's output is allowed to do. A small founding bench built those gates, and each engineer on it runs their own system end to end. That model scales the individual seats it was designed for. Nothing yet owns the technical strategy across all of it: what gets built next and in what order, which gate has to tighten before the next model generation makes today's checks too loose or too slow, and how to say all of that plainly in the room where the company decides what to build
- This seat is that owner. It is not a manager layered over engineers who already run their own systems; nobody reports to it, by design. It is a technical peer to the founder, the kind of person who could hold a CTO or VP of Engineering title elsewhere, who sets direction by argument rather than authority, co-designs the gate architecture a multi-agent build loop runs inside, and carries the reasoning past the codebase into company strategy. In the age of AI, engineering leadership is a different job: fewer people, more agents, and the leverage sits in the gates and the sequencing, not in headcount
- A company that ships through agent-written code, held to standard by gates. The spec is the executable and the architecture is built to be machine-legible. The gates, not headcount, are the scaling mechanism, and they age every time the model generation underneath changes
- A flat structure with no engineering-manager layer. Every engineering seat decides its own domain end to end. Your technical strategy has to work by argument, not authority, and the engineers you work beside answer to their own seat charters and the founder
- Verification cost governs delegation. When checking an agent's output costs nearly as much as doing the work, delegation goes net-negative. So the hiring bar and the gate design have to be built together, or autonomy stops paying
- Coordination cost rises fast past a few concurrent agents. That is the physics behind "we don't need a manager": the seat is a technical-strategy peer, not a multiplier of headcount
- A governance law any operator can change live. Since August any operator here can change the rules the company runs on without waiting on the founder. Your strategy operates inside that law rather than around it
- Skill decay under heavy delegation. The seat keeps the founding bench, itself included, hands-on enough to step in when an agent loop hits a wall, not just review its output from a distance
- Engineering technical strategy and sequencing. What the founding bench builds next and in what order, across the serving layer, the agent build loop and the product surfaces, argued and defended, never dictated to any seat
- The deterministic gate architecture. Co-designed with the engineers who already hold pieces of it: the invariant-level rules deciding when an agent's code, content or infrastructure change is safe to ship, rewritten as the model generation underneath changes
- The engineering voice in company strategy. You translate technical reality (what is buildable, what the codebase can bear, what a new model unlocks or breaks) into language the founder and the rest of the company can act on, in writing clear enough that no follow-up meeting is needed
- The engineering hiring bar. You read trial work and technical interviews across open engineering seats and defend one craft bar company-wide, without being the manager any of those seats report to
- Your seat charter. Within your first quarter you co-sign a charter for this seat. It names one machine-checkable number that proves the seat is working, and a written split of what you decide freely versus what you bring to the founder to decide
Application process
- Async video screen. About 15 minutes, on your own time. It replaces the recruiter screen. We want to see how you think, not how you present
- Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the founding engineers you'd work beside
- Conversation with the founder. Technical strategy, live: what you'd sequence first, which gate you'd tighten before the next model generation, and where you push back
- Paid work trial (or Fast-Track Portfolio Review). Real technical-strategy work against our codebase and next-model-generation risk, alongside judging real agent-authored diffs against live gates. Paid at a day rate. Fast-Track option: For exceptional engineering leaders with verifiable shipped systems, technical strategy artifacts, or open-source work, we can fast-track through a live technical architecture and code walkthrough in place of a multi-day trial
Our take
Artificial intelligence has come on strides in recent years, but many assistants still struggle with relatively simple tasks. For example, AI-powered shopping assistants have frequently been found to supply conflicting information regarding prices, product specifications and more.
Product.ai is building what it calls the verification layer for AI commerce, to combat inaccurate and misleading product overviews. The platform can do things like check whether coupons actually work, verify the latest prices, and decipher whether claims about products are true.
Formerly known as Demand.io, the company's earlier focus was on creating innovative eCommerce experiences, but its rebrand to Product.ai in 2026 cemented its pivot to creating the truth layer for eCommerce. This mission answers a growing problem for consumers, as increasing AI marketing noise drowns out true reviews - meaning there should be ample opportunity for Product.ai to make an impact.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Company benefits
- Full health coverage: All premiums covered for you and your family. Medical, dental, vision.
- Daily catered lunch: For the LA team. One less thing to think about during the workday.
- Unlimited PTO: That we actually expect you to use. Recharge is not optional, it is structural.
- Remote flexibility: An LA headquarters with full remote support. Work where you do your best thinking.
- Free garage parking and commuter assistance
Company HQ
Sawtelle, Los Angeles, CA
Leadership
Michael Quoc
(Founder & CEO)Experience as Senior Product Manager for Yahoo! Inc. from 2002 to 2006 and as Director of New Products from 2006 to 2008.
Brian Stanback
(Chief Architect)A software Engineer with a passion for building highly interactive web applications. Brian has over 15 years of experience as a Web Developer, Software Architect, and Database Engineer.
Jimmy Doheny
(Director of Operations)Jimmy joined Product.ai in 2017 as a Partner Marketing Manager. They then moved into the role of Senior Manager of Revenue Operations in 2019 and Director of Operations in 2021.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 12 more jobs at Product.ai