Founding AI Product Engineer

Litellm; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Job summary

LiteLLM is seeking a Product Engineer to work directly with the founders, shaping features from idea to production. You'll talk to customers, design solutions, and ship with a strong quality bar.

You will own major product areas, prototype ideas, and design APIs using Python and FastAPI, while building great developer experiences across API, dashboard, and CLI.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience building production software, preferably with Python.
• Comfortable moving across the stack (backend, frontend, infrastructure, APIs).
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• High ownership and initiative.

Responsibilities

• Build new product features from concept to production.
• Work directly with customers to understand pain points and validate solutions.
• Ship quickly while maintaining a high quality bar.
• Prototype new ideas and iterate based on user feedback.
• Own major product areas and continuously improve them.
• Design backend APIs and services using Python and FastAPI.
• Build intuitive developer experiences across API, dashboard, and CLI.
• Collaborate with founders on product direction and technical decisions.
• Help define and build LiteLLM's second major product.

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Strong software engineering fundamentals

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Job description

Product Engineer

LiteLLM is the world's most popular AI Gateway, trusted by companies like Adobe, Netflix, and NASA. We're building the next generation of infrastructure for AI applications—and now we're building our second product.

We're looking for a Product Engineer who wants to work directly with the founders to figure out what developers need, ship quickly, and build products that thousands of engineering teams use every day.

About the Role

This isn't a traditional product management role, and it isn't a traditional software engineering role.

You'll spend your time talking to customers, understanding their problems, designing solutions, writing production code, and shipping features. One week you might build a new authentication flow, the next week you're redesigning an onboarding experience, integrating with a new provider, or launching an entirely new product.

If you enjoy owning a problem end-to-end—from idea to production—you'll thrive here.

Responsibilities

• Build new product features from concept to production.

• Work directly with customers to understand pain points and validate solutions.

• Ship quickly while maintaining a high quality bar.

• Prototype new ideas and iterate based on user feedback.

• Own major product areas and continuously improve them over time.

• Design backend APIs and services using Python and FastAPI.

• Build intuitive developer experiences across our API, dashboard, and CLI.

• Collaborate directly with the founders on product direction and technical decisions.

• Help define and build LiteLLM's second major product.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.

• Experience building production software, preferably with Python.

• Comfortable moving across the stack when needed (backend, frontend, infrastructure, APIs).

• Strong product intuition and curiosity about how customers use software.

• Excellent written and verbal communication.

• High ownership—you naturally identify problems and solve them without waiting to be asked.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information.

• Excited by shipping quickly and learning from real users.

Bonus Points

• Experience at an early-stage startup.

• Experience building developer tools or infrastructure products.

• Open source contributions.

• You've built and launched your own product.

• Familiarity with AI infrastructure, LLMs, or developer platforms.

Why Join LiteLLM?

• Work directly with the founders every day.

• Build products used by thousands of engineering teams around the world.

• Own meaningful product decisions—not just implementation.

• Move incredibly fast and see your work in production immediately.

• Help define the future of AI infrastructure and developer tooling.

• Competitive salary, equity, health, dental, and vision benefits.

About LiteLLM

LiteLLM is the world's most widely adopted AI Gateway. We provide a unified API for 100+ LLM providers along with routing, authentication, budgets, observability, and governance for production AI systems. Thousands of companies rely on LiteLLM to power AI in production.

If you love talking to users, building products, and shipping software that people actually use, we'd love to meet you.