Founding Product Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 25, 2026.
ABOUT
The Persona Labs is building a new kind of social platform focused on something most social products do not explicitly optimize for: helping people become real friends.
We want to help people discover interesting people around them, find meaningful common ground, start low-pressure interactions, continue promising conversations, create shared experiences, and ultimately build real-life friendships.
DISCOVER → CURIOSITY → COMPATIBILITY → INTERACTION → UNDERSTAND → IRL EXPERIENCE → FRIENDSHIP
THE AI LAYER
Alongside the platform, we are building a proactive personal companion that learns about the user and helps them navigate this journey through personalized recommendations, suggestions, reminders and experiences.
THE OPPORTUNITY
We are looking for a Founding Product Engineer to help build the platform from the ground up. This is a 0→1 product engineering role where you work directly with the founder and engineering team to turn ambiguous product problems into working software.
You will be expected to:
Understand the problem → explore solutions → make trade-offs → design → build → ship → measure → improve.
WHAT YOU WILL BUILD & OWN
MOBILE
Onboarding, profiles, discovery, interactions, messaging, activities, and companion experiences.
SOCIAL SYSTEMS
Relationships, social graph, compatibility, and interaction flows.
BACKEND
APIs, services, authentication, notifications, and background processes.
DATA
PostgreSQL models, user/activity data, analytics, and behavioural signals.
REAL-TIME
Messaging, live interactions, notifications, and event-driven workflows.
AI-ENABLED
Recommendations, personalization, and companion-powered experiences.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Cloud deployment, CI/CD, monitoring, reliability, and cost management.
WHAT YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LOOKS LIKE
• Build and ship mobile and full-stack product features end-to-end.
• Design APIs, database models, and backend services for a social product.
• Translate ambiguous product problems into simple, reliable technical solutions.
• Make architecture and engineering trade-offs for performance, scalability, security, and cost.
• Work closely with the founder, product/design team, and Companion Intelligence engineer.
• Prototype quickly, test assumptions, and iterate based on user behaviour and product feedback.
• Own features from problem → architecture → implementation → deployment → improvement.
• Help establish engineering practices around testing, monitoring, security, and reliability.
WHO SHOULD APPLY
• Experience: 0–4 years, including exceptional fresh graduates. Strong 1–3 year engineers and experienced 3–4 year product builders are welcome.
• Fundamentals: Strong CS/software engineering fundamentals.
• Evidence of Building: We value what you have built more than the number of years on your résumé. Shipped apps, strong side projects, hackathons, internships, open source, or startup work are highly valued.
• Mindset: High ownership, curiosity, strong fundamentals, clear communication, learning velocity, and the ability to work through ambiguity.
WHAT WE LOOK FOR
MOBILE CAPABILITY
Can you build and ship a polished mobile experience?
ENGINEERING DEPTH
Do you understand why a system works, not just how to make it run?
PRODUCT JUDGMENT
Can you determine what should be built when the problem is ambiguous?
ARCHITECTURE / SYSTEMS
Can you reason across APIs, databases, services, real-time systems, scale, and cost?
SPEED OF EXECUTION
Can you move from idea → prototype → production quickly without compromising fundamentals?
AI FAMILIARITY
Do you understand how modern AI can become a useful, reliable product capability?
BUILD WITH US
You will join at a stage where many answers do not exist yet. You will not simply implement someone else’s architecture, you will help decide what the architecture and product should become.
CAREERS:
Apply with your resume, GitHub, portfolio or shipped work.
https://forms.gle/12YpUSBY2Sqs5xjp8
www.thepersonalabs.com
Skills
React Native, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin, React.js, TypeScript, NodeJS (Node.js), Javascript, Python, PostgreSQL, Docker, Software deployment, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), WebSocket, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Software architecture, Network architecture, PyTorch, GitHub, A/B Testing, Android Development, iOS App Development, Supabase, Redis, CI/CD