Product Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: 

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

 

Product Engineer

Location: New York, NY
Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage – $4.3M Raised
Office Type: Onsite
Salary: $215,000–$235,000 + 0.25%–0.5% Equity

Company Description

We’re representing an early-stage AI company building software to modernize American manufacturing. Many manufacturers and distributors still rely on highly manual workflows for order entry, quoting, purchasing, accounts payable/receivable, and customer service. This company is building AI agents capable of automating those front-office operations.

The platform is already deployed across 22 customers, ranging from approximately 20-person businesses to Fortune 500 companies, and has processed more than 100,000 purchase orders. The seven-person company has raised $4.3M in seed funding and is currently growing approximately 30% month over month.

The long-term vision is ambitious: automate operations across 10,000 factories by 2035, beginning with order entry and quoting before expanding deeper into office and factory-floor workflows.

What You Will Do

• Build the core product and AI infrastructure used across every customer deployment.
• Develop and improve the company's agent runtime, extraction frameworks, integration frameworks, evaluation systems, and internal tooling.
• Build production AI systems involving multi-step agent pipelines, RAG, VLM-based extraction, and evals.
• Own a major technical domain outright, from architecture through production and ongoing support.
• Turn recurring customer integration requirements into reusable platform capabilities.
• Build frameworks that make new ERP integrations increasingly configurable rather than requiring one-off engineering work.
• Improve extraction and reasoning across complex manufacturing documents, including purchase orders and engineering materials.
• Work closely with Forward Deployed Engineers to turn lessons from individual customer deployments into scalable product capabilities.
• Design backend and data infrastructure capable of supporting the platform as customer volume grows.
• Work directly with founders, engineering leadership, and customers to determine what should be built next.
• Follow real customer workflows end-to-end to understand where software fails and how it can be improved.
• Occasionally travel directly to manufacturing facilities to observe users and workflows firsthand.
• Ship quickly—the expectation is to begin contributing production code within your first week.

Within the first few months, you'll progress from understanding a real order end-to-end, to launching new customer use cases, to taking significant ownership over a core technical domain and the scalability of the broader platform.

Ideal Background

• Strong professional software engineering experience with a history of shipping deep, technically complex products to paying customers.
• Production experience building AI systems used by real customers, rather than exclusively prototypes or research projects.
• Hands-on experience with multi-step AI agent pipelines, RAG, VLM extraction, and evaluation systems.
• Strong Python engineering experience.
• Broad architectural ability spanning backend systems, data infrastructure, and cloud environments.
• Experience owning systems through production deployment, operation, debugging, and customer support.
• Demonstrated ability to move quickly and independently in ambiguous environments.
• Strong product instincts and interest in solving real operational problems rather than optimizing solely for technical benchmarks.
• Comfortable working directly with customers and learning complex business workflows.
• Computer Science degree required.
• Able to satisfy the company's U.S. person requirement under 22 CFR 120.62 due to ITAR-related customer data obligations.
• Based in New York or willing to relocate.
• Comfortable traveling up to approximately five days per month to customer manufacturing facilities.

Preferred

• Previous experience as a founder, co-founder, CTO, founding engineer, or similarly early technical hire.
• Experience building a company or meaningful product from the ground up.
• Early-stage startup experience with substantial individual ownership.
• Experience designing reusable technical platforms from requirements initially discovered through customer deployments.
• Experience with manufacturing software, industrial workflows, ERPs, MES systems, or similar operational technology.
• Experience building document extraction or multimodal AI systems.
• Familiarity with AWS Bedrock, EC2, S3, Google Vertex AI, Claude, or GPT models.
• Full-stack capabilities, including familiarity with Next.js and React.
• Experience designing secure, isolated customer environments.
• Interest in manufacturing and willingness to spend time directly with customers at their facilities.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $215,000–$235,000.
• Equity: 0.25%–0.5%, with four-year vesting and a one-year cliff.
• Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 20 days of paid time off.
• Up to $10,000 in relocation assistance.
• Location: New York, NY.
• Office: Onsite.
• Expect approximately 50-hour workweeks in the office; weekend work is not required.
• Travel of up to approximately five days per month to customer manufacturing facilities.
• Core stack includes Python, PostgreSQL, AWS (Bedrock, EC2, S3), Google Vertex AI, Next.js, and React.
• AI stack uses frontier models including Claude and GPT, selecting models based on the specific task rather than standardizing on a single provider.
• Customer environments run in isolated AWS instances with models deployed inside those environments to address customer data requirements.
• Engineers operate with substantial autonomy—there is no traditional product manager assigning tickets or prescribing the weekly roadmap.
• Best suited for a highly independent engineer who wants technical co-founder-level ownership of a product that already has real customers and production usage.

Salary Range: $215,000-$235,000 base.