AI Software Engineer, Product

Palona AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Palona AI in New York seeks a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in production. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems.

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.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production shipping.
• Depth in Python/backend or TypeScript/React frontend.
• Experience with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems.
• Ability to design APIs, data models, and asynchronous workflows.
• High quality bar for testing, observability, reliability and UX.
• Comfort working directly with users in a fast-changing startup.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from discovery to launch.
• Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, and data models as one product.
• Design agent workflows combining models, rules, and human escalation.
• Collaborate with restaurant operators to turn feedback into capabilities.
• Integrate with POS, reservations, messaging, and telephony systems.
• Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops.
• Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the stack.
• Own architecture, tests, security, and correctness while prototyping.

Skills

Years of experience

Software fundamentals

Python

Backend engineering

TypeScript/React

LLMs / AI models

APIs / data models

System integrations

Testing & observability

User-facing product mindset

Tools

Python

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

TypeScript

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.