Software Engineer - AI Commerce

Doing product research online feels harder than ever. AI promised better information. Instead it flooded the web with hallucinations, generated content, and confident-sounding answers that have no idea what's true.
Product.ai is building the truth engine for shopping. When every other AI tool summarizes and guesses, we verify. Not opinions. Not averages. Ground truth.
Self-funded and profitable for over a decade, we're a team of e-commerce veterans who have been building commerce truth systems at scale. Over a billion dollars in annual transaction volume. Millions of customers served. Product.ai is our flagship - the new starting point for shopping in the AI era. We're in early alpha, building alongside our community of domain experts.
We are seeking a Software Engineer to build and ship our consumer-facing product surfaces. This is not a feature factory role. You own the full stack from concept through live user feedback, you trust AI to multiply your output, and you measure yourself on user impact, not pull request counts. Our engineering team builds at a pace that competitors with 10x our headcount can't match. We need someone who makes that ratio even more lopsided.
Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid schedule with flexibility. For the right builder, we're open to remote.
What You Will Build

• The Velocity Loop. You use AI to write code, tests, and documentation. LLMs are core infrastructure in your workflow, not toys. You know what to automate (boilerplate, test scaffolding, documentation) and what to think about (architecture, edge cases, user behavior). AI-augmented development is how we maintain a 20-person team that outships companies with 200.
• Full-Stack Feature Delivery. You own features from React frontend through Node/Python backend to PostgreSQL schema. You design the data model, build the API, ship the interface, and measure whether it worked. One engineer, full loop.
• Product-Minded Engineering. You're solving user problems, not executing specifications. You push back on requirements that don't make sense. You suggest alternatives that ship in two days instead of two weeks. When the data says users don't care about the feature you just built, you kill it and move on.
• Autonomous Quality Ownership. You own quality end-to-end. You write tests, you deploy with confidence, you built the monitoring that tells you when something breaks. There is no QA team. There is no separate ops team. You build it, you ship it, you own it.
• Foundational contributions. Every engineer's code becomes infrastructure someone else builds on. You choose boring technology when boring technology works. You introduce complexity only when the problem demands it.

Who You Are

• You ship fast and you ship often. You'd rather have a good enough solution in production generating real user feedback than a perfect solution sitting in code review. Your instinct when faced with ambiguity is to build something small and learn, not to schedule a meeting and discuss.
• You're a product builder, not a coder. You care about user problems, not clever code. When you look at a ticket, you ask "what user behavior are we trying to change?" before you ask "what's the technical approach?" You've killed your own features when the data showed they weren't working.
• You use AI as a force multiplier. You write code with AI assistance daily. You're clear-eyed about what it's good for and where it fails. You are not ideological about AI. You are practical. You have measurably increased your shipping velocity using AI tools.
• You prefer building to process. You'd rather ship a feature than attend a planning meeting. You've worked in environments with heavy process and light process, and you strongly prefer light. You can self-organize without a project manager.
• You take initiative and own outcomes. You see a problem, you propose a solution, you ship it. When something you built breaks, you fix it - you don't file a ticket.

Ownership
We operate as a high-performance studio, not a typical corporation. Every builder at Product.ai is a partner, not an employee collecting a paycheck.

• Base: $280,000 - $350,000. Top of market. Your base covers your life; your ownership builds your freedom.
• Equity: You receive a formal ownership stake via Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests with a $0 strike price. Not options. Not RSUs. Actual ownership that participates in the upside from day one and qualifies for Capital Gains tax treatment.
• Profit Sharing: You participate in the company's annual success. As an equity holder, you receive a pro-rata share of Free Cash Flow (FCF) - real cash, every year, not a promise tied to a future exit.
• Liquidity: We operate an Annual Tender Offer where the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO. No hoping for an acquisition.
• Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family, daily catered lunches, and unlimited PTO that we actually expect you to use.

How to Apply
We skip the 60-minute recruiter screen. Instead, you'll answer a few short video questions so we can get to know how you think and work. Less time than a phone screen, and you can do it whenever works for you.
The Process:

Click Apply.

Record short video responses to our questions (no prep required - we want to see how you naturally think).

Your responses go directly to the hiring team. No ATS. No keyword parsing.

We're not looking for polished presentations. We're looking for signal on who you are.