Senior Product Engineer

Hey 👋 I'm Erik (CTO). My background is in ML and computer vision (PhD, Google Research / DeepMind), and I've been a narrative RPG gamer most of my life.

I'm hiring a Senior Product Engineer to join our engineering team of three. My focus is the core narrative engine—the AI that tells coherent stories. This role owns the platform around it: the systems that deliver those stories to players, the tools creators build with, and the infrastructure that keeps it reliable, scalable, and built right.

You own everything around the narrative engine: the systems that deliver stories to players, the tools creators build with, and the infrastructure that keeps it standing.

You don't need ML, LLM, or AI research experience. We want a strong product engineer.

Six things on your plate (at least)

1. Platform architecture

   Real-time delivery of AI-generated narrative: closer to a media platform than a SaaS app. Large catalogs, media storage and delivery, search, caching, and query performance.

2. Creator tooling

   Tools for creators to design characters, settings, and story elements the AI brings to life.

3. Payments and subscriptions

   Plans, paywalls, entitlements, failed payments, and refunds.

4. Orchestrating third-party APIs that are slow, expensive, or unreliable

   Retries, fallbacks, caching, and graceful failure.

5. Monitoring and operations

   Deploys, alerting, tracing, production debugging, performance, and cost work.

6. Engineering foundations

   Code review, CI, testing culture, and a CI/CD setup we can iterate on quickly.

• 4–5+ years, hands-on. Senior enough to work unsupervised and to have seen good engineering practice up close, while still writing code every day.

• A finisher. You talk about what you shipped and maintained, not what you started.

• Autonomous. You don't need work broken down for you, you don't go quiet for a week, and foundational calls with no playbook energise you.

• You measure things. You want numbers on how the product is used and what it costs to run before deciding.

• You care about user experience. A janky transition bothers you, and you treat the designer as a partner rather than silently improvising.

• Communicative. You flag problems early and disagree openly.

• Technical skills

• Strong TypeScript, React, and Next.js, with depth and repeated use.

• Node / TypeScript backend services. This is where most of the backend work sits.

• Backend fundamentals: data modeling, API design, async jobs, queues, and background processing.

• Agentic engineering: fluent with coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. We want to leverage AI without shipping slop.

• Comfortable reading and writing Python.

None of these are required.

• Consumer products with real users: media, streaming, entertainment, games, creative tools, or marketplaces.

• Subscription businesses: billing, paywalls, and entitlements.

• Realtime systems: reactive backends such as Convex, Firebase, or Supabase; SSE; websockets; and live-updating interfaces.

• Audio or video pipelines: encoding, storage, CDN, and playback.

• Analytics and experimentation: event tracking, funnels, A/B testing, and feature flags using tools such as PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, or Segment.

• Experience as an early hire at a company that then grew, or on small teams with broad ownership.

• Polished, design-led interfaces. Send links or screenshots.

• Side projects that show initiative: open source, game jams, or interactive fiction.

We don't waste your time

We read every application ourselves and respond with a decision within two weeks.

1. Intro call with Vansh (CEO)—20 minutes about you, us, and what you want next.

2. Intro call with Erik (CTO)—20 minutes about your engineering background.

3. Live coding session—one hour working on something real together.

4. Meet us in person—over food and drinks, then we decide.