Senior Software Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 28, 2026. First seen by Alion on Mar 18, 2026.
Waystation AI | Redwood City, CA (in person, 5 days/week) | Full-time
Own whole product areas end to end, on a growing engineering team where something customer-visible ships every week.
About Waystation
CPG is a $2 trillion market in the U.S., and the manufacturers behind it still run procurement out of email and spreadsheets. Waystation turns supplier email into a structured system of record - every quote, spec, COA, and PO extracted automatically - then gives procurement, QA, and R&D a platform to compare ingredients, track certifications, and draft supplier comms on top of it.
Seed-stage, venture-backed, with paying customers including national bakery, supplement, and better-for-you brands. One customer saved over $200,000 in the first three months. Led by repeat founder Ryan Caldbeck (previously CircleUp); backed by Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, 87 Capital, Floodgate, and SuccessVP.
What you'll own
Whole product areas, end to end. Supplier comparison, cert tracking, quote workflows. Backend, interface, and the follow-through after launch - not tickets.
Impact you can point to. One of six engineers and growing, at a company with real customers and a market measured in trillions. What you ship this month shows up in a renewal conversation next month, and there's no layer between you and that.
A weekly shipping cadence. Rough and working beats perfect and late. Then you come back and make it right.
AI as product. Extraction, comparison, drafting, retrieval. Including the unglamorous parts: evals, fallbacks, and what to do when the model is confidently wrong.
The customer's actual problem. You'll be on customer calls. Requirements don't arrive pre-chewed.
Quality that holds. When something breaks, you fix the system, not the symptom.
What we're looking for
We'll back the right engineer over the right résumé.
5+ years building production software, with real depth across the stack.
2+ years at an early-stage startup (seed to Series B) - required. No playbook, no infrastructure handed to you. A purely big-company background isn't a fit.
You love building product. The one we won't compromise on. You care what it feels like to use and you have opinions about the interface. If you'd rather be handed a spec than help write one, this will frustrate you.
Fluent in AI, both directions. You build with it - we live in Claude Code - and you ship model-powered features reliable enough to sell.
You communicate with precision. An engineer, a customer, and the CEO all leave knowing what you decided and why.
You close things. Messy problems start to finish, and you flag slippage before it slips.
You're all in. Small team, office five days a week, rocket ship you plant a flag on - not a stepping stone.
Bonus: B2B SaaS in workflow-heavy industries; email, documents, or messy unstructured data; CPG, supply chain, or procurement; search and retrieval; multi-language data (Chinese, Spanish).
Not the role for you if
You want a defined lane and a clean backlog.
You need finished design and product specs before you start.
You'd choose architectural elegance over what ships this week.
Five days a week in Redwood City, customer calls, and the occasional plant floor in a hairnet don't appeal.
What we offer
Competitive base salary and meaningful equity. Full health, dental, and vision. Unlimited vacation. Direct work with a repeat founder and CEO, and a front-row seat to how an AI-native company gets built.
Values
We are reliable, credible, and authentic. We are solution-oriented. We are proud of our work, our customers, and ourselves.
How to apply
Skip the cover letter. Send two things:
Something you built that you're proud of. What was true before, what you built, what was true after.
A product call you got wrong. What you believed, what happened, what you changed.
Short is fine. We're reading for ownership and judgment, not polish. We move in days, not weeks.