Staff Engineer, Product

Staff Engineer

You'll work as a key lead member of our product team at the highest velocity tier we operate, agentic engineering with Claude as the substrate, building hands-on, mentoring as the team grows, reporting directly to the CPO.

This is the highest-level individual contributor engineering role 'll work primarily as a builder. You'll also be the technical expert in the room when we sit across from critical enterprise accounts. You'll mentor other engineers as the team scales around the work you lead.

You won't receive specifications. You'll produce them, from comprehensive interactions with product leadership, executive leadership, customers, and engineering. You translate vision into shipping product without needing the path drawn for you.

The current focus is Chat, our governed conversational AI product for business. The actual scope is broader:
Chat is the wedge into a category of business applications we're building on the SUPERWISE platform. Whoever takes this role builds the foundation for that category.

You'll work inside an opinionated development environment that expects evidence-based completion, specifications as artifacts, and discipline at agentic velocity. The candidates who fit this role tend to be the ones who would have built something similar themselves if they hadn't found it already built.

• 10+ years building production software systems. Real systems, real users, real consequences when things break.
• Agentic AI as your primary engineering mode. You drive Claude (or equivalent) as the primary author of code. You judge, edit, and direct its output. You're not using AI as autocomplete — you're operating an order of magnitude above that.
• Architect-grade quality at startup velocity. You think about the substrate of the stack through to the UI. You catch security vulnerabilities others miss. You add useful nuance to systems unprompted.
• Discipline. You're organized. You operate inside opinionated systems without fighting them. You document, you verify, you don't claim completion without evidence.
• Range. You move between heads-down building, customer-facing technical conversations, executive strategy discussions, and mentoring younger engineers — at high quality across all of them.
• Geographic alignment. You live in Indiana or Tennessee (preferred), or Illinois or Ohio (considered). You're available for in-person work every ~2 months.

If you use AI as autocomplete, this isn't your role.

If you need detailed specifications and a clear chain of command to operate, this isn't your role.

If you won't submit a public Git Hub repository with session logs as the gateway to a conversation with us, this isn't your role.

We're being explicit about this because the comp band attracts a wide range of candidates and the role only fits a narrow one. The faster the wrong candidates skip past this post, the faster the right candidates get our attention.

Base: $200,000–$225,000

Equity: 25,000 stock options

The exercise:
Build a Kanban application using Claude (preferred) or another agentic AI toolset. Plan to spend approximately 40 hours of work over a two-week window.

The submission:

• A public Git Hub repository containing your code
• Your AI session logs (transcripts of how you built it) included in the repo
• Your CV in the repo or linked from the README

Submission is via a form on our exercise landing page (link below). Public Git Hub repository only — we don't accept zips, Git Lab links, or email attachments.

Submission window:
May 15, 2026 - June 15, 2026

The rubric:

• Leverage — how effectively you drove the AI to produce quality output
• Depth and complexity — substance beyond surface CRUD
• Substrate-to-surface thinking — reasoning across the full stack
• Security instinct — catching vulnerabilities the prompt didn't ask about
• Creative nuance — useful additions that demonstrate judgment

What happens after:

We review all submissions after the window closes. The top 20 by rubric score receive a $25 gift card and a personal call from John Leschorn. The candidates whose submissions and CVs match the Staff Engineer profile move into our interview process. Other top-scoring candidates may be considered…