Product Engineer (Mid-Senior)
Full-time
On-site
New York, NY
$140K - $200K
Role highlights
Requirements
Pipeline
About this role
Interview process
Ideal candidates
Rejected feedback
About Traba
Announcements
Candidates to submit
Similar roles
Primary recruiter
Start recruiting
Akshay V
1 recommended candidate from your network
Oscar Alvarez
Oscar Alvarez
Technical Recruiter
Somewhat engaged
Top 45% of hiring managers
Time to first action
12 hours
Reply time
7 days
Active days
7 days
Feedback quality
Vague
Latest announcement
· Sep 16, 2026
Hi all – hearing some feedback that candidates think their working hours would be 70-80+ hours, this is not accurate.Our working hours are 9-7PM (though most folks stay to 9pm with dinner) on Monday to Thursday and most of the team is out by 6PM on Friday. There is flexibility here so please do not let this be a blocker to candidate interest.We are looking for more submissions across all 3 open roles on Paraform and would appreciate your help here! Please let us know if you have any questions.
Role highlights
Hiring goal
2 hires remaining
Recruiter activity
Recruiter activity on this role is medium
No final round interviews
There currently aren't any candidates in final round interviews or offer stage
Why candidates should join
A Once-in-a-Generation Window
Our AI native approach makes it possible to automate matching, verify credentials, and predict reliability in an industry that has never had access to modern technology. Combined with a structural labor shortage, rising e-commerce demand, and a major US reshoring push, the opportunity to rebuild this industry from the ground up exists right now.
Massive Market with a Clear Path to IPO
Over 600 billion dollars is spent on staffing globally, with over 100 billion in industrial staffing alone. Publicly traded staffing companies already exist, and Traba is building the modern platform to replace them.
The runway to IPO is clear of obstacles.
In-Person Culture That Accelerates Your Career
Traba is built around an in-person culture in New York City. Tight feedback loops, real-time collaboration, and daily proximity to high-caliber teammates create a learning environment that compounds your skills and confidence for decades to come.
Ownership from Day One
You will own entire systems and problem spaces, not narrow tickets. You are expected to think like a PM, and own not just code, but impact. The decisions you make have a direct impact on company metrics like growth, revenue, reliability, and customer expansion — and you see the results in days, not quarters.
Every Team Operates at an Olympian Standard
Startups are not an individual sport. Your equity is worth more when every function — engineering, sales, finance, operations — is performing at the highest level. At Traba, every team is committed to the same standard of excellence, which means your work compounds alongside theirs.
Deep Moat in the Physical World
Traba operates at the intersection of technology and the physical supply chain, which creates real competitive moats. The operational complexity of coordinating workers, shifts, and facilities in real time makes this extremely difficult to replicate. This is not a market where a new feature from a competitor closes the gap.
Proven Results That Speak for Themselves
Traba has improved customer fill rates from 46% to 95% and reduced time-to-fill from a week to a single day. Our AI-driven matching, reliability scoring, and demand forecasting deliver measurable outcomes in an industry that has never had access to this kind of technology.
Backed by World Class Investors
Traba has raised $45M from top-tier investors like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst, with Founder's Fund tripling down and making Traba the marquee portco for Founders Fund VIII. On the board is elite VCs and operators Keith Rabois (58% exit rate vs industry 12%) and Samir Kaul (12 exits).
Massive Growth with Sustainable Revenue
Since 2022 we have 40X'd in revenue, while maintaining extremely healthy contribution margins. We've been able to demonstrate repeatable, expanding revenue with healthy unit economics on the road to IPO.
Suggested outreach
Requirements
By tier
By category
Calibrate a candidate in Parabot. to see how well they fit the requirements.
Dealbreaker
Work experience
3+ YOE (strict requirement) owning features and products at high pedigree, fast-growing start-ups (ideally Founding Engineer) with tangible business results
Updated
Hard skills
Strong product intuition and thinking on user problems or impact across the org
Updated
Soft skills
Comfortable and truly excited to ship and lead projects at scale with high velocity, early-stage ambiguity, and cross-functional friction
Updated
Baseline
Seniority
3 - 4 years of experience as a software engineer (mid-sr) owning products in early-stage teams
Work experience
Built 0-to-1 agentic AI products at fast-growing start-ups with high calibre teams
Updated
Education
Computer Science or other technical degree from a top 25 university
Updated
Hard skills
Deep in TypeScript, React/React Native, Node.js, and/or PostgreSQL
Updated
Nice-to-have
Work experience
Breadth of experience across multiple domains/products, particularly in:
– agentic and applied AI
– matching/recommendation systems (e.g., dating apps)
– marketplaces (e.g., Instacart, Uber)
– AI labour platforms (e.g., Mercor, Micro1, Ribbon.ai)
– multi-sided platforms
– recruiting (e.g., Rippling, Deel)
– non-technical users in antiquated industries (e.g., logistics, supply chain, healthcare)
Updated
Hard skills
Experience integrating LLMs or agents into real product (prompting, tool wiring)
Updated
Traits to avoid
No indicators of scrappiness (e.g., FAANG profiles must have side projects etc)
Updated
Frequent career moves (e.g., multiple stints under 2 years)
Updated
Pipeline
Your candidates
Analytics
Inbox
1candidate
Intro Call - 30 minutes
2candidates
Technical Phone Screen - 45 minutes
0candidates
HM Round
0candidates
Onsite - 2-3 hours
0candidates
CEO/CTO + Half Day - Half day
0candidates
Offer
0candidates
Hired
1candidate
Recent Activity
Changed status of Candidate #12 from Submitted to First round
4 days ago
Updated screening question: What are you looking for in your next role and what are you driving towards? Why does the early-stage environment interest you?
5 days ago
Updated screening question: No answer required but STRONG preference for you to attach a screening call snippet.
5 days ago
Updated screening question: Please indicate your preference for the AI Agents or Applied AI team.
5 days ago
Updated screening question: How excited are you to be in office 5 days per week in NYC?
5 days ago
Updated screening question: What impact have you driven in your most recent company? Why do you stand out against other engineers there?
5 days ago
Changed status of Candidate #11 from Submitted to Rejected
5 days ago
Changed status of Candidate #9 from First round to Rejected
6 days ago
About this role
Applied AI
You will build Traba's product on top of AI agents, taking frontier models and existing agents and putting them to work across our staffing marketplace to automate the pipeline that sources, vets, matches, and places workers on millions of shifts. The AI Agents team builds the agent platform; your job is to apply it where it creates leverage. This is a product-engineering role, so priorities will shift – some quarters that is an agent that automates vetting or matching, others it is a payments flow or platform work. You will partner with our CTO on architecture and roadmap, and build the platform the rest of the company runs on.
About You
You take frontier models and existing agents and wire them into real product across the stack, shipping reliable automation rather than owning the orchestration internals. You do not need every task to be an AI task: you take the highest-priority problem, model or not. You move easily between API design, UX, and deployment infrastructure, and you have a track record of shipping scalable, performant applications from frontend interfaces to backend distributed systems.
You Will
Apply existing agents and frontier models across the stack – worker app, business app, ops platform, marketplace – to automate vetting, matching, and fulfilment.
Lead frontend and backend development, mentoring other engineers.
Architect and build core systems: real-time matching, autonomous vetting pipelines, distributed systems, and APIs.
Own product surfaces end to end, partnering closely with product and design.
AI Agent (Neo AI)
You will build the AI agents themselves: the harnesses, evals, orchestration, and model strategy that the rest of Traba's product runs on. We are looking for a Senior AI Agent Engineer to join as a founding member of the Agents team and build the next layer of Traba's product – an agentic platform that synthesises the data flowing through our marketplace and operates autonomously inside our customers' supply chain workflows. The Applied AI team puts these agents to work across the product; you own the agents and infrastructure they depend on. You will embed deeply in our customers' operations, design and ship production agent harnesses on top of frontier models, and turn what you learn in the field into durable product. You will partner closely with our CTO, product, and our operators to take early-stage ideas to scaled deployments.
About You
You have shipped real product on top of LLMs – not just chat wrappers. You have designed agent harnesses, structured tools, written evals, and tuned prompts against production traces. You think in terms of capability, reliability, and unit economics, not just whether the model says the right thing. You enjoy time with the people who do the work, learning an industry's vocabulary, edge cases, and operational tempo, and you let that shape what you build. Dropped into a fuzzy customer problem with a half-formed hypothesis and a deadline, you scope, build, evaluate, and ship without waiting for a spec. You move between prompt iteration, eval design, backend services, and customer-facing UI in the same week, and you care about evals that catch regressions and traces that are easy to debug.
You Will
Embed with customers and operators to understand how supply chains run today, then design and ship agents that take meaningful work off their plate.
Build production agent systems on frontier LLMs: tool use, sub-agents, retrieval, structured outputs, MCP servers, and the orchestration that ties them together.
Own evaluation as a first-class discipline: datasets from real traces, rubrics and graders, experiments, and improvements you can prove move the needle.
Architect the data, services, and APIs the agent layer depends on, integrating our internal systems with customers' WMS, TMS, and ERP environments.
Codify repeatable deployment patterns so each new customer rollout is faster than the last.
Neo Further Reading
https://traba.work/neo
https://traba.work/resources/case-studies/how-shipsmarter-put-its-operation-on-autopilot-with-neo
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/traba-launches-neo-ai-decides-191600907.html
Role details
Salary
$140K - $200K
On-site work policy
In-person 5 days per week in New York. Relocation is available for candidates who require it.
Full-time position
Location
New York, NY
Tech stack
Typescript/Javascript, React, React Native, APIs, Python, Node.js
Equity
Competitive
Visa sponsorship details
Open to visa transfers (e.g. OPT, H1B transfers)
Additional visa sponsorship details
Able to sponsor most visas except net new H1Bs (transfers okay)
Hiring Count
Looking to hire 1 - 3 candidates for this role
Report to
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-zhifan-chen/
Requirements
By tier
