Product Engineer

Requirements

• 2–5 years: In engineering, product, a founder's office, or your own startup.
• Product intuition: You can look at a screen and say what is wrong with it, and why.
• Proof you build: Something real you made with AI tools. A product, an internal tool, an automation people still use.
• Hustle: You unblock yourself. You do not wait for a spec, a designer or permission.
• Appetite for depth: You do not need to know production systems today. You need to want to own them.
• Clear communication: You explain decisions, flag uncertainty early, and move work forward in a remote team.

Responsibilities

• Customer problems: Talk to users every week. Turn what you hear into a clear call on what to build next.
• Concept to production: Scope it, build it with agents, deploy it, and iterate on real usage.
• A product surface: Own a part of Periskope end to end, and the metric it moves.
• What ships: Challenge agent output, test assumptions, and stay accountable for the code and the result.
• Production reliability: When something breaks, find out why and fix it. Learn the data models, APIs and WhatsApp infrastructure underneath.

Job Details

Remote for candidates based in India.

Interview Process

Share your profile and one thing you took from idea to shipped: the problem, what you built, how you used agents, and what changed. Shortlisted candidates move through three steps.

1. Conversation · Async on WhatsApp
2. Talk through your work and product decisions with Bharat (CTO).
3. Build together · 90 minutes
4. Take a real Periskope problem from brief to working build, live with Bharat.
5. Final conversation · 20 minutes
6. Discuss the role and mutual fit with Swapnika (CEO).

Why This Role Exists

For years, building software needed two people. A PM decided what to build. An engineer wrote the code. Most of the time went into the handoff between them.

That split no longer makes sense. AI agents now write most of our code. Typing code stopped being the bottleneck. Judgment took its place: knowing which problem matters, what the smallest useful fix is, and whether it holds up in production.

A Product Engineer is one person doing the whole loop. You talk to the customer, make the call, direct the agents, ship the change and watch what happens next.

How the Work Flows

1. Listen: Sales calls, support chats, churn reasons, usage data.
2. Decide: Pick the problem that matters. Cut it to the smallest useful fix.
3. Build: Direct agents. Review every diff. Test what they assume.
4. Ship: Release to real customers, behind a flag if it is risky.
5. Measure: Check usage and tickets. Keep it, fix it or kill it.

Then back to listening. A good loop takes days, not quarters.

Who This Is For

You do not need an engineering title. You need taste, speed, and a real wish to build things that run in production.

• Engineers: Who care more about the customer than the stack.
• Product managers: Who are tired of writing specs for someone else to build.
• Founder's office operators: Who already do a bit of everything and want to ship software too.
• Ex-founders: Who want to build product again, with less overhead