Product Engineer (Contract)

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Product Engineer (Contract) based in India.

This is a hands-on product engineering opportunity for someone who thrives in ambiguous, high-ownership environments. You will take an already functioning AI product from founder-built prototype to a product that real users can adopt, use, and trust independently. The role spans feature completion, UX refinement, testing, security hardening, deployment, user onboarding, and ongoing product iteration. You will work directly with a founder, make practical technical and product decisions, and stay close to early users to understand what needs to improve. The product uses an orchestration layer across leading AI models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, creating an opportunity to work at the intersection of software engineering and agentic AI. Success will depend less on credentials or years of experience and more on your ability to ship, exercise sound judgment, and turn working software into something people genuinely want to use.

Accountabilities:

• Take ownership of the product from its current working state through launch, user adoption, and subsequent iterations.
• Complete remaining feature development, remove or hide unfinished functionality, and make pragmatic decisions about what is ready to ship.
• Improve the product's aesthetics, usability, and overall user experience so it feels polished and production-ready rather than like a prototype.
• Resolve known bugs, expand automated and manual test coverage, and improve overall software quality and reliability.
• Conduct a security-hardening pass ahead of the first external users and collaborate with external security expertise when required.
• Deploy the product to alpha users and create an onboarding experience that enables users to reach meaningful value without constant founder or engineering assistance.
• Communicate directly with early users, respond to support requests, identify recurring friction points, and translate real-world feedback into product improvements.
• Add appropriate instrumentation and analytics to understand actual user behavior and distinguish observed usage from assumptions or stated preferences.
• Help turn alpha learnings into the beta roadmap and contribute to decisions around the most appropriate initial customer segment.
• Build the technical systems, documentation, and development practices needed to enable a future engineering team to take ownership of the product.
• Work effectively across the existing stack, including vanilla JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Netlify, Node.js tooling, and AI provider APIs.
• Use agentic coding tools as a core part of the development workflow while independently reviewing, testing, and validating their output.
• Make thoughtful technical trade-offs, identify potential downstream effects of changes, and maintain a strong understanding of the overall system.
• Partner directly with the founder on execution while taking ownership of the engineering decisions required to move the product forward.

Requirements:

• Demonstrated experience shipping a real product using an agentic coding harness such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, or an equivalent tool as a primary development environment.
• The product you built using an agentic coding workflow must have been used by people other than yourself; candidates should be able to explain what they built, what the AI tools got wrong, and how they identified and corrected those issues.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with the ability to read unfamiliar code carefully, understand system-wide dependencies, identify subtle bugs, and anticipate the consequences of technical changes.
• Demonstrated ability to take a product from development through launch and ongoing support rather than stopping once the core implementation is complete.
• Strong product instincts and user empathy, with the ability to recognize when technically functional software may still provide a poor or confusing user experience.
• Experience working independently in ambiguous environments where requirements are not reduced to a predefined ticket queue and where you are expected to determine what needs to happen next.
• Willingness and ability to communicate directly with users, investigate real-world problems, and incorporate feedback into product decisions.
• Experience with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS; familiarity with vanilla JavaScript and single-file or minimally abstracted applications is particularly relevant.
• Experience with or willingness to work across Supabase/PostgreSQL, Netlify, Node.js, and third-party AI APIs.
• Strong judgment around AI-assisted development, including the ability to verify generated code rather than accepting confident but incorrect output.
• A demonstrated track record of finishing and supporting projects is more important than formal credentials, years of experience, recognizable employers, or a specific educational background.
• No specific degree, number of years of experience, startup background, or prior security specialization is required.
• Candidates should be comfortable working full-time, approximately 40 hours per week, with overlap into US morning and/or evening hours.
• Shortlisted candidates will be expected to discuss a shipped project built with an agentic coding harness, demonstrate their approach to product execution, and complete a coding interview.

Benefits:

• Contract engagement with a full-time commitment of approximately 40 hours per week.
• Fully remote opportunity open to candidates based in India.
• Two-month initial engagement, starting immediately, with the possibility of continuation.
• Significant autonomy and ownership over engineering execution and product delivery.
• Direct collaboration with a founder and close exposure to product decisions, early users, and real-world feedback.
• Opportunity to work hands-on with an AI orchestration product integrating leading frontier AI models.
• Broad product ownership spanning engineering, UX, testing, deployment, observability, user onboarding, and iteration.
• Opportunity to work with an intentionally lightweight technology stack without unnecessary framework complexity.
• Evaluation focused on demonstrated judgment, shipping ability, and practical engineering skills rather than degrees, years of experience, or brand-name employers.
• Opportunity to shape a product from its working foundation through real-world launch and early customer adoption.