Founding Product Engineer

Rockstar

$150K — $225K *
Legal & Accounting
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of product engineering experience with production applications or automation tools.
  • Strong programming skills in relevant languages such as TypeScript, React, and Swift.
  • Experience using AI coding agents to enhance product development.
  • Proven ability to navigate ambiguity and tackle messy customer environments.
  • Excellent communication skills for explaining technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

  • Own and manage core product workflows in tax prep and practice management.
  • Design and build abstractions to streamline accounting processes.
  • Utilize the internal agent platform for rapid product implementation.
  • Develop interfaces and workflows that meet live customer needs.
  • Translate customer insights into repeatable product patterns.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work in a vertically integrated environment combining software and AI.
  • Engage in hands-on product development, influencing live customer experiences.
  • Collaborate across diverse teams including product, design, and engineering.
  • Enjoy an agile work environment with a focus on practical outcomes.
Full Job Description
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.

The client 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 the client'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.


What You Will Do in Your First 30 Days
  • Learn how CPA firms move work from source documents to reviewed tax packages, books, and client follow-ups.
  • Shadow existing client 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.


Compensation
  • Base Salary: $150,000-$225,000
  • Equity: 0.25%-1.00% equity


About the Interview

Their process is lightweight, practical, and tied directly to the actual work:
  1. Intro conversation about your background and what you have built.
  2. Practical product/workflow exercise using a real or realistic back-office workflow.
  3. Founder conversation focused on taste, pace, customer empathy, and how you work with AI agents.

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