AI Software Engineer, Product

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

We are looking for a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in the real world. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems. The job begins with a customer or product problem and ends when the solution is operating successfully in production—not when a model call works locally.

You may work on voice ordering, reservations, catering, restaurant operations, client configuration, analytics, or entirely new agent capabilities. You will collaborate directly with product, design, customer-facing teams, and restaurant operators; make fast product and technical tradeoffs; and own the quality of the resulting experience.

Our stack includes Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js applications, real-time voice agents built with LiveKit, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and modern LLM, speech, and multimodal providers. Exact stack match is less important than full-stack range, product judgment, and a record of shipping.

What you’ll own

• Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration.
• Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.
• Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.
• Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities.
• Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints.
• Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved.
• Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience—not only within one layer of the stack.
• Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness.
• Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous.
• Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring.

• 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.
• Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack.
• Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.
• Product judgment: you can simplify scope, identify the highest-leverage user problem, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product.
• Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems.
• A strong quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience.
• Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment.
• AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment.

• Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan.
• Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable.
• Family Leave
• Short Term & Long Term Disability
• Paid time off and company holidays.
• Learning and development support.