Product Engineer | AI Startup
Location: San Francisco, CA | In-office
Compensation: $175,000-$225,000 base salary plus competitive equity
Experience: Approximately 3-4 years of full-time software engineering experience
The Opportunity
An early-stage AI music startup is hiring a Product Engineer to build polished web and mobile experiences for musicians, educators, and creators worldwide.
The client develops frontier AI models that transform audio into sheet music, MIDI, and interactive piano rolls. Its products already serve hundreds of thousands of users across more than 180 countries.
You will join a five-person, pre-Series A team and work directly with the founders, AI researchers, and consumer product experts. This is a hands-on role for an engineer who can take an abstract product idea, make thoughtful UX decisions, and ship the complete experience across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
What you'll do
- Build and iterate on consumer-facing web and mobile products from end to end
- Develop polished, intuitive interfaces using React, Next.js, and TypeScript
- Translate loosely defined ideas into clear product decisions and production-ready features
- Own implementation across the frontend, backend, APIs, data layer, and cloud deployment
- Collaborate directly with founders and product stakeholders on UX/UI decisions
- Dogfood the product, identify friction, and continuously improve the user experience
- Ship features, resolve bugs, and make sound technical trade-offs with minimal hand-holding
- Help establish the engineering and product standards of a growing early-stage team
Requirements
- Approximately 3-4 years of sustained, full-time experience building full-stack web or mobile products
- Strong professional experience with React and Next.js
- Demonstrated ability to build complete, customer-facing or consumer-facing products
- Strong product judgment with clear examples of making UX/UI decisions and iterating based on user needs
- Experience delivering technically challenging projects from concept through production
- Public GitHub projects, a portfolio, live products, or demos that clearly show the quality and complexity of your work
- Experience working at an early-stage startup or in another technically demanding, high-ownership environment
- BS in Computer Science or a closely related technical discipline
- Experience deploying modern web applications to cloud infrastructure
- Ability and willingness to work in person in San Francisco
Nice to have
- Mobile application development experience using React Native, Flutter, or a comparable framework
- Experience building consumer technology, games, creative tools, media products, or other interaction-heavy applications
- Familiarity with MIDI, MusicXML, Web Audio API, WebGL, or browser-based media processing
- Musical experience or a genuine interest in music, music education, or creative technology
- Experience building AI-powered product features
- A record of independently exploring and shipping technically ambitious side projects
This role is probably not a match if
- Your experience is primarily backend, infrastructure, data, or ML engineering, with limited ownership of the user experience
- You cannot provide projects, demos, or shipped products that demonstrate strong product and UX/UI judgment
- Your recent experience consists mainly of freelance assignments, overlapping contracts, or short engagements without sustained product ownership
- You prefer narrowly scoped tickets over independently turning ambiguous ideas into complete products
- You are substantially outside the targeted experience range
- You are unable to work regularly from the San Francisco office
What makes this role exciting!!
- Build AI products that help musicians learn and play the songs they love
- Work directly with founders and influence product and engineering decisions from the beginning
- Own meaningful features across web and mobile instead of being limited to one layer of the stack
- Join a technically ambitious team combining consumer product development, music, and frontier AI
- Receive a competitive base salary of $175,000-$225,000 plus meaningful equity
Work Authorization
The client is open to candidates with existing U.S. work authorization.
