About the role

We're hiring for an early engineer to join the small, but cracked, product engineering team at Adapt. We only hire product engineers which means that whether the customer problem requires frontend, backend, infra, or some combination thereof (almost always!) a product engineer is capable and curious enough to bring engineering fundamentals to solve the user's problem and build a remarkable product.

We are particularly seeking an engineer who cares deeply about designing, building, and helping others build well-architected and scalable-by-design systems. We care about the craft (yes, we vibe a little too), and we want someone who can sharpen the architecture that got us here and help make the calls that take us further.

About you

Years aren't all equal (startup years are like dog years, as an example) and they're not the best predictor of success. That being said, you probably exhibit most of these characteristics:

• 3-5+ years of professional engineering experience
• Experience working at an early stage (seed, Series A, Series B) startup
• Expertise in modern JavaScript and particularly full-stack TypeScript
• Expertise with at least one modern framework (React, Vue, etc.)
• Experience with one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) and interest or familiarity with tooling like Kubernetes
• Strong interest in many of the latest and greatest AI tools and models
• Consistent track-record and demonstrated examples of high-quality systems and features that you've built independently
• Ability to break down a complex and large problem into independently shippable solutions (you may have found yourself saying "What's the simplest thing we can do to try to solve this problem?" or "What can we learn by doing something quickly?")
• Care deeply about users - you've got receipts of customer-driven shipping decisions, and when something you built frustrates someone, you feel it
• A genuine desire to grow the craft of engineering and product-building (you could call it "taste"), with an eye for the little big details in both architecture and product

How you'll be successful

As a Product Engineer at Adapt, you own features end-to-end - from the customer Slack thread, through architecture and shipping, all the way to the launch blog post (we call it "ship and tell"). Your job isn't done until customers love what you built. As we scale, you'll own whole pillars of the platform. Concretely, you're responsible for:

• High-quality execution. This is the central responsibility of any engineer, you design, build, instrument, and confidently scale a system, capability, or feature that just works.
• Shipping frequently. You ship boulders (like features and capabilities), stones (smaller, quality of life improvements), and pebbles (quick fixes and bugs) regularly and consistently.
• Customer discovery. You will directly integrate alongside our early customers and the many ahead to understand their pain points of using Adapt and use those to understand and propose and build solutions to those problems.
• Strong internal and external communication. You will be responsible for writing our customer-centric blog posts and communicating directly with customers when new capabilities launch and how they can be used and understood.
• Set a high bar. Lead by example. Expect mentorship, but bring a strong default to figuring things out yourself - especially the pace of an early-stage startup in a crowded AI market.
• Collaboration. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the team and leadership in San Francisco. We bias toward shipping, together.

You'll also work directly with leadership: your manager (me - here's why I joined Adapt), our CTO and co-founder Sean Smith, and the rest of the leadership team.

How you may fail

Perhaps it's also helpful to evaluate a candidate who may not be successful at Adapt and apply inversion theory. You will not be successful if you:

• Have not worked as a professional engineer in any capacity for any company
• Prefer working with a formalized product function or product manager
• View vibe coding sufficient for building a great product or think that code is a solved problem
• Don't review or understand the code that you (or your agent(s)) write and that others on the team write
• Find yourself regularly saying "it's good enough"
• Find yourself waiting for direction and clarity and don't enjoy making decisions independently
• Don't enjoy talking directly to customers

What is excellence in this role

The role of leadership is to cultivate a sense of excellence on the team and in individuals on the team that reflect it. A simple way to frame it is a three-part framework:

1. What is the job to be done (see above: "What you'll do")
2. What is excellence in that job
3. Holding accountable to excellence (that's both your job and mine!)

You establish excellence in this role by doing the following:

1. In the first 30 days you independently ship requested and impactful features with some guidance and direction
2. In the next 30 days, you're moving more towards fuller independence, proposing ideas and talking to customers to gain conviction as to why they're worth investing in (and also shipping them)
3. By 90 days, you're building your own ideas, directly closing the loop and establishing new loops with customers, and you're feeling like you're independent and cooking

After 90 days and beyond, any requisite training wheels are off and you're feeling empowered to own decisions, propose improvements, and you've established a strong customer-centric understanding of the product we have and how it can be improved.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation strategy including large equity grants for early hires at an early stage in the company's journey
• Inclusive healthcare packages (medical, dental, vision)
• Top-tier equipment: latest Apple silicon (Mac Studio / MacBook Pro), 5K display, and any peripherals you need to do your best work
• Frontier AI access for every engineer and designer: Claude Code, OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, and most importantly unlimited internal use of Adapt itself
• Daily catered lunch in our Presidio (San Francisco) office, plus snacks and coffee
• A founder-dense, in-person team in one of the most beautiful corners of San Francisco - direct access to the CEO, CTO, and founding eng/design every day

Base salary: $200-300k for the SF Bay Area. Actual offer depends on skills, experience, and location. We're open to relocation for the right candidate but prefer Bay Area applicants today. Total comp also includes equity, benefits, and potential bonus or variable pay. Your recruiter will walk you through the details.