AI Product Engineer - End-to-End Restaurant Tech

Palona AI; Los Altos (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and stock options

Health, dental, vision benefits

Family leave

Short/Long-term disability

Paid time off and company holidays

Learning and development support

Job summary

Palona AI in Los Altos, CA is seeking a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in production. You will own experience across customer interfaces, backend services, and integrations with external systems, collaborating with product, design, and frontline users.

The role emphasizes shipping real-world solutions with a strong bias toward product judgment, performance, and reliability in a fast-moving startup environment.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and shipping production web or platform products.
• Depth in either Python/backend or TS/React frontend, with ability to work across the full stack.
• Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.
• Product judgment: can simplify scope and differentiate a valuable product from a demo.
• Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and external-system integrations.
• Strong testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience standards.
• Comfort working directly with users in a fast-changing startup environment.
• AI-native workflows with independent technical judgment.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from discovery through launch and iteration.
• Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as a coherent product.
• Design agent workflows combining models, context, memory, rules, deterministic services, and escalation.
• Work with restaurant users to understand failures, uncover needs, and turn feedback into product capabilities.
• Integrate with POS, reservations, messaging, telephony, and other external systems handling imperfect data.
• Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops to measure probabilistic behavior.
• Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full stack.
• Prototype with AI-native development while owning architecture, tests, security, and correctness.

Skills

Python/backend engineering

TypeScript/React frontend

LLMs / speech / agent systems

APIs & data models

Observability & testing

Full-stack collaboration

Tools

PostgreSQL

FastAPI

React

Next.js

LiveKit

AWS

Job description

Palona AI in Los Altos, CA is seeking a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in production. You will own experience across customer interfaces, backend services, and integrations with external systems, collaborating with product, design, and frontline users.

The role emphasizes shipping real-world solutions with a strong bias toward product judgment, performance, and reliability in a fast-moving startup environment.