Founding Product Engineer

Cranston

$130K — $160K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Strong programming skills with experience in shipping production applications or customer-facing automation.
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity in messy customer environments.
  • Ownership mentality required to ensure successful outcomes.
  • Effective communication skills for explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
  • Familiarity and comfort with using AI coding agents as primary implementation tools.

Responsibilities

  • Own core product workflows for tax prep, bookkeeping, and practice-management operations.
  • Design and build product abstractions to streamline messy accounting work into repeatable systems.
  • Utilize internal agent platform to quickly translate product ideas into functional software.
  • Develop interfaces and data models that perform well in live customer scenarios.
  • Codify successful customer deployment patterns back into the main product.
  • Inspect data, logs, and the software itself to identify and rectify issues.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work across product, design, engineering, and implementation teams.
  • A chance to significantly impact the efficiency and scalability of CPA firm operations.
  • Involvement in transforming complex accounting tasks into automated workflows.
  • Opportunity to work with AI technology in a practical application.
  • Engagement in a vertically integrated company focused on software, AI, and managed back-office operations.
Full Job Description
About the role

You will work across product, design, engineering, and implementation. Some days that means mapping how tax packages move through a firm. Other days it means building a review workflow, designing an agent loop, tightening data models, or debugging why a customer workflow failed in production.

This is a product engineering role for someone who wants to build the system, not just spec it. You will turn what we learn from firms into durable product: interfaces, automations, review loops, workflow primitives, data models, and agent behavior that work across customers.

Cranston is vertically integrated across software, AI agents, and managed back-office operations. That makes the problems unusually concrete: if the product is wrong, the work breaks. If the product is right, firms can take on more clients without adding headcount.

What you will do
  • Own core product workflows for tax prep, tax review, bookkeeping, client requests, and practice-management operations.
  • Design and build product abstractions that turn messy accounting work into repeatable, reviewable systems.
  • Use Cranston's internal agent platform to move from product context to working software quickly, then inspect the result until it is right.
  • Build interfaces, workflow states, data models, and agent behavior that hold up in live customer usage.
  • Codify repeatable patterns from customer deployments back into the main product.
  • Use the product yourself, inspect logs and data when needed, notice what is wrong, and push until the details are right.
Your first 30 days
  • Learn how CPA firms move work from source documents to reviewed tax packages, books, and client follow-ups.
  • Shadow existing Cranston workflows and identify places where better product behavior would remove real manual work.
  • Pick workflows and turn them into a concrete product plan: inputs, user-facing states, edge cases, success criteria, and verification steps.
  • Drive an AI-agent implementation loop from product plan to working feature.
  • Test the workflow yourself against real or realistic data, fix the rough edges, and help ship it into a live customer or internal operator workflow.
Who we are looking for
  • You have strong programming skills and have shipped production applications, serious internal tools, or customer-facing automation.
  • You have high agency and can navigate ambiguity in messy customer environments where the problem is not handed to you cleanly.
  • You have an ownership mentality and are willing to do whatever it takes to make something work.
  • You have good communication skills to explain technical tradeoffs and earn trust with non-technical stakeholders.
  • You are comfortable using AI coding agents as your main implementation tool and holding their output to a high bar.
Skills

AI Agents • React • Swift • TypeScript • Docker • PostgreSQL

Bonus points
  • Experience in accounting, finance, tax, audit, professional services, or another workflow-heavy enterprise vertical.
  • Previous founder experience or meaningful ownership at an early-stage startup.

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