Nous - Staff Product Engineer

• First and foremost, you're a Product Engineer (please review the description there). Beyond that, you will: • Own 2–3 high-leverage bets per year. • Own 2–3 high-leverage bets per year • Turn fuzzy problems into clear plans. • Start from messy reality and define the problem, the metrics that matter, constraints, and a concrete technical approach. • Ship small, end-to-end slices every 1–2 weeks. • Design work so that real members feel the benefit often: a new flow, a clearer explanation, a safer orchestration. Each slice has a before/after we can actually look at. • Be a domain owner in one or more critical areas (e.g. front-end, workflows/Temporal, infrastructure, agentic-AI core, data modelling). • domain owner • You’ll set and evolve the patterns and primitives others build on, and keep them simple, understandable and teachable. • Design “paved roads” for a small, fast team. • Spot recurring problems and create stable contracts, libraries and workflows so others don’t have to reinvent them. You care about reliability and observability, but right-size them for a ~10-engineer-and-growing team. • Act as a multiplier for other engineers. • multiplier for other engineers. • Mentor emerging tech leads and seniors, embed with teams when they’re stuck, and give reviews that both catch issues and teach patterns so people leave stronger than they arrived. • Create written clarity around the work you lead. • written clarity • For example, for each big initiative, there’s one canonical, skimmable doc people across Product/Ops/Eng can rely on it. • You’ll report directly to the CTO and work closely with Product, Ops, and rest of leadership. There aren’t many layers: how you frame problems and ship solutions will directly influence what the company does next. • What year one might feel like • In your first 6–12 months, you might: • Re-design how new members see value. • Take the journey from “upload a pile of bills” to “see an accurate and optimal recommendation” and cut it in half: better flows, smarter document understanding (which may require helping the user to find the right document), clearer explanations, safer automation. You’ll know it worked because more people measurably save more with Nous. • Invent and roll out a standard pattern for long-running switches. • For example: “Our agent asks a user on WhatsApp for missing info → member replies on WhatsApp → our workflows pick up cleanly and continue”. You’d define the flows, error states, timeouts, logging and SLOs, build the helper libraries, and get them adopted across multiple categories with minimal custom code. • Own the front-end platform or another core domain. • For example, decide how we do routing, data fetching, error handling and state management better; help engineers ship polished, accessible UI quickly; develop coding patterns that can help us, or even non-engineers, build 10-100x faster through AI-assisted coding. • Throughout, you’ll be shipping code regularly, not just writing docs or drawing diagrams. • How this role is different? • Compared with a Product Engineer, as Staff you: • Operate at the level of company bets, not just team projects. • company bets • Define and evolve the patterns other engineers rely on, rather than just using them. • Define and evolve the patterns • Change how engineering works across Nous, not just within one squad. • Change how engineering works • Are expected to grow other leaders, not just ship more yourself. • grow other leaders • If that step up in scope and leverage – while staying deeply hands-on – sounds like your sweet spot, you’ll probably enjoy this. • So, … is this you? • You’re hungry and product-obsessed: you care as much about the member outcome and UX as you do about the elegance of the system behind it. • hungry and product-obsessed • You’ve led fuzzy, cross-functional bets before – pulling together product, ops and engineering to ship something that really moved a metric. • fuzzy, cross-functional bets • You get frustrated when you see wasted effort or avoidable complexity, and you naturally design paved roads so others don’t trip on the same things twice. • wasted effort or avoidable complexity • You’re happiest when you’re hands-on in code, but you also enjoy writing the doc, drawing the diagram, and bringing others with you. • hands-on in code • You think in systems and primitives, not just features: contracts, workflows, failure modes, observability. • systems and primitives • You enjoy mentoring, growing, and unblocking other engineers, can demonstrate that you’ve been effective at it, and feel a bit restless if you’re just shipping your own tickets. • mentoring, growing, and unblocking • You’re comfortable with our stack, and can demonstrate expertise on key parts of it. • You prefer a small, sharp, in-person team over a huge org with lots of pre-defined processes, and you’re itching for a “big unlock” moment to have outsized impact. • small, sharp, in-person team • If this resonates and you can demonstrate it, we'd love to talk to you.