AI Product Engineer, Ampersand
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
User-facing integrations for SaaS products
Open for applications
User-facing integrations for SaaS products
1-20 employees
Open for applications
+ Equity
3 days a week in office
1-20 employees
Company mission
To usher in a future where data can flow freely between SaaS applications, where a new product "just works" with a company's existing SaaS stack.
Role
Who you are
- You are an AI enthusiast - you use AI tools daily to increase your productivity, and like experimenting with the latest frameworks and models. We are not looking for AI researchers. We are looking for AI practitioners and hackers
- You are a generalist engineer who enjoys jumping into all parts of the stack, and can also go deep if needed
- You have worked on production systems operating at scale
- You can own roadmap items end-to-end, and excel when you have large scope and autonomy
- You are excited to build for developers, and are ready to do what it takes to make them successful, even if it involves non-coding tasks like documentation, or hopping on a video call to help them troubleshoot
- Our stack is Go and React (TypeScript). Even if you haven't used those technologies before, you are willing to learn
What the job involves
- At Ampersand, you will work on a developer platform that other companies depend on for their integrations. Some of the projects that you might tackle in the first 6-12 months include:
- Improve the Ampersand AI SDK and MCP server, so that Ampersand fits seamlessly into the AI agent stack
- Implement an "AI Chat" experience in the Ampersand dashboard for developers to ask questions like, "Is customer X's Asana integration working right now?"
- Use LLMs to auto-parse API error messages in customer workflows and remedy them
- This job has numerous upsides as listed below. However, like every job, this one has its downsides, and we want to be transparent about them:
- There is some grunt work involved. While we think there are lots of exciting technical challenges to be solved, there will be days when you'll be chasing down an unclear error message from a third-party API
- You will be expected to wear multiple hats. All engineers are involved with customer support, writing documentation, staffing conferences, etc. We'll be sharing the load across the team (including the founders!)
- We believe that for the right person, the upsides massively outweigh the downsides. They include:
- Tremendous learning and growth opportunities as the company scales. You will not only learn a lot as an engineer by having a large scope, you will also get exposure into other aspects of the business like marketing, customer development, strategy, etc. This is the perfect role if you think you might start your own company one day
- There is something special about building for developers - your impact is magnified because you are providing the building blocks that other products rely on. Plus developers make great customers - it is fun to talk to users you can empathize with, and they are great at filing bugs.
- And of course, there is big financial upside if we do well. We are still in the early days. So you'll get significantly more equity than others that join later
Our take
Company systems of record are designed to be highly configurable to suit most business needs, but this flexibility comes at a price. When building a SaaS product, it can be difficult to connect to this vital data source, requiring a huge amount of developer time to make things line up. Even then, it can be difficult to scale or change anything without a lot of work.
In contrast to the plethora of companies that solve data connectivity issues with APIs, Ampersand's solution is to offer a platform that lets engineers directly add user-facing integrations to their apps. It also bucks the low- and no-code trend, believing that control, flexibility and granularity are more important to skilled engineers than simplfication offered by competitors.
Its approach has drawn interest from investors, who have invested a significant amount in a recent seed round led by Matrix Partners. This funding will be used to round out Ampersand's founding team and to develop its platform with a view to monetisation in the near future. Ampersand's goal of replacing APIs as the connective layer between customer-facing SaaS apps and a company's system of record is ambitious, but it's off to a very strong start.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (1 round)
Apr 2023
$4.7m
SEED
Total funding: $4.7m
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Lauren Long
(Co-founder & CTO)Before co-founding Ampersand was a Software Engineer at Shortwave and a Technical Engineer for Google. Previously co-founded Boxit.
Ayan Barua
(Co-founder)Was VP of Engineering at G2. Before that, was Co-founder & CTO of Siftery and Credii.
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