Founding Product Engineer

Pally (YC S25); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

401(k)

Health insurance

Job summary

Pally is a Bay Area startup building a personal assistant that lives in text messages. We’re hiring a senior to staff level engineer to own the agent and the experience, shipping product decisions from model outputs to the readouts on a phone.

This is a hands-on engineering role with product ownership: you’ll work in the agent code, prompts, evals, integrations, and the surfaces users interact with. You’ll be senior to staff level, with 4+ years shipping AI products, and a track record of

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering, with experience at an AI product company, AI lab, or consumer product company.
• Hands-on experience building production agents with tool use, memory, and long-running conversations, and designing evals a team trusts to make ship decisions. Post-training or fine-tuning experience is a plus.
• A record of shipping features end to end and owning the outcome, not only the ticket: you can point to a metric that moved because of something you built.
• Full stack: TypeScript, React, and Next.js for the product, Python for evals, and Postgres on the back end.
• Strong product and design judgment. You notice when a word is wrong, a reply is too slow, or a flow has one step too many, and you fix it.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows, grounded in the fundamentals to verify, correct, and own everything you ship.
• You want founding-team scope. You'll set the bar for how Pally works and help hire the engineers who join after you.

Responsibilities

• Own the agent and the experience: the tool-calling loop, memory and context assembly, prompts, and model routing so small, fast models take most turns and frontier models take the ones that matter.
• Build the harness that turns
• did that reply feel right?
• into a number: turn-level judges, replay of real conversations, regression suites that run before every deploy.
• Own the experience from onboarding to group chats and group teams, including the web app, and the moment a user texts us that they love it.
• Own features end to end, run experiments behind feature flags, keep what works, and delete what doesn't.
• Talk to users: read transcripts every day, talk to users every week, and study the numbers to inform what you build next.

Skills

4+ years software engineering

Agent development

Evaluation design

End-to-end feature shipping

Founding-team scope

AI-assisted development fluency

Strong product judgment

Tools

TypeScript

React

Next.js

Python

Postgres

Job description

Hey, we're Haz and Wyatt, the founders of Pally.

Pally is a personal assistant that lives in your text messages. You text it like a friend. It replies to the messages you've been avoiding, books the dinner, chases the invoice, and handles the hundred small things that pile up in a week.

We're a small team based in the Bay Area, and we're hiring people who will make Pally the #1 consumer agent in the world.

The role

You'll own the agent and the experience. Most of Pally is a text thread. There are no buttons, no spinners, no dashboard. Every product decision comes out of the model as a sentence, and every sentence has to be right, fast, and able to actually get something done. You'll own all of it, from how the agent decides what to do, to the tools it uses, to how the reply reads on a phone.

This is a hands-on engineering role with a lot of product ownership. You'll be in the agent code, the prompts, the evals, the integrations, and the product surfaces, talking to users and shipping to them every week. In practice that means:

• The agent. Design and build how Pally decides to act, ask, wait, or reach out first: the tool-calling loop, memory and context assembly, prompts, and model routing so small, fast models take most turns and frontier models take the ones that matter.
• Evaluations. Build the harness that turns "did that reply feel right?" into a number: turn-level judges, replay of real conversations, regression suites that run before every deploy.
• The experience. How Pally reads on a phone, from the first reply to a follow-up weeks later. Onboarding, group chats, teams, approvals, and the web app. The first five minutes decide whether someone texts Pally again.
• Product features. Own features end to end, from idea to the moment a user texts us that they love it. Run experiments behind feature flags, keep what works, and delete what doesn't.
• Talking to users. Read transcripts every day, talk to users every week, and study the numbers. What you learn decides what you build next.

We'll measure you on one thing: how much better Pally gets at being someone's assistant, week over week, in the evals and in how many people text it every week.

Profile

This is a senior to staff level role. We're looking for someone who has shipped AI products people use every day, at a frontier AI lab, an AI product company, or a team operating at that level.

• 4+ years of software engineering, with experience at an AI product company, AI lab, or consumer product company.
• Hands-on experience building production agents with tool use, memory, and long-running conversations, and designing evals a team trusts to make ship decisions. Post-training or fine-timing experience is a plus.
• A record of shipping features end to end and owning the outcome, not only the ticket: you can point to a metric that moved because of something you built.
• Full stack: TypeScript, React, and Next.js for the product, Python for evals, and Postgres on the back end.
• Strong product and design judgment. You notice when a word is wrong, a reply is too slow, or a flow has one step too many, and you fix it.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows, grounded in the fundamentals to verify, correct, and own everything you ship.
• You want founding-team scope. You'll set the bar for how Pally works and help hire the engineers who join after you.

Practical stuff

$200-300k base + significant equity, 401(k), and health insurance. Full-time, in person in San Francisco, CA.

We work exceptionally hard. If work isn't your primary focus, this isn't for you. However, we also give you full autonomy over your schedule. We don't care when you work hard, only that you do.