Product Development Engineer

Product & Technical Strategy:

• Co-own product strategy with Product and Design shape what gets built, not just execute a handed-down roadmap.
• Drive the technical architecture for a scalable, multi-tenant product, with a clear point of view on when to refactor, rebuild, or ship the pragmatic fix.
• Own the balance between shipping fast for product-market fit and building a platform that won't collapse under scale.

AI & Innovation:

• Champion AI adoption on two fronts: (1) embedding AI/ML capabilities into the product where they create genuine customer value, and (2) using AI-assisted development tools (code gen, testing, code review, observability) to raise team velocity and quality.

People & Org:

• Lead and scale the engineering org (ICs, tech leads, managers) as the product and company grow, hiring ahead of need without over-hiring.
• Set up (or mature) engineering rituals: sprint planning, architecture review, incident response, on-call, postmortems.

DevOps, Infrastructure & Reliability:

• Own DevOps and infrastructure strategy — CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, environment management (dev/staging/prod), and infrastructure-as-code.
• Drive site reliability practices: uptime/SLA targets, on-call rotations, incident response, root-cause analysis, and blameless postmortems.
• Own cloud cost management and infrastructure scaling decisions — right-sizing spend against growth stage.
• Oversee the observability stack — logging, monitoring, alerting, tracing — so issues are caught before customers feel them.
• Define disaster recovery and business continuity plans for production systems.

Security & Compliance:

• Set and enforce security practices across the SDLC: dependency management, secrets handling, access control, vulnerability scanning, and compliance needs (SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR as applicable).

Business & Stakeholders:

• Own engineering metrics that matter to a product company — deployment frequency, cycle time, defect escape rate, MTTR — and their connection to customer-facing outcomes (retention, NPS, uptime).
• Partner closely with Sales/CS/Support on customer escalations, technical due diligence for enterprise deals, and roadmap trade-offs.
• Manage engineering budget, tooling spend, and vendor/build-vs-buy decisions.
• Be a visible technical leader externally — conference talks, blog posts, or community presence that supports hiring and company brand (as relevant).

Core Technical Skills:

• Strong hands-on background in software engineering, with real depth in at least one modern stack (languages, frameworks, cloud).
• Experience with AI/LLM systems, RAG, vector DBs, and agentic frameworks.
• Cloud architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP) — compute, networking, security, serverless.
• Microservices, API gateways, event streaming (Kafka/EventBridge/PubSub).
• Databases: SQL, NoSQL, graph, vector.
• DevOps: CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes.
• Security: OAuth2, JWT, SSO, Zero Trust, data governance.

Architectural & Leadership Skills:

• Enterprise architecture frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman).
• Domain-driven design (DDD), event-driven architecture (EDA).
• High availability, scalability, resilience, disaster recovery.
• Cost modelling and performance engineering.
• A coaching mindset — measures success by the growth of the people around them as much as the systems they build.
• Comfortable as an internal evangelist and an external presenter/orator for the company's technical work.