Founding Product Engineer

Quippy; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Quippy is seeking a founding Product Engineer to work directly with the founder, own meaningful parts of the product, and decide what to build, how it works, and when it ships. You should enjoy thinking about why people use a product as much as how it’s built, turn vague problems into concrete experiences, and collaborate with design and engineering to bring features to production.

This fast-paced, hands-on founding role includes room to influence the roadmap as the company grows and equity

Qualifications

• Experience with React Native and Expo, or substantial mobile development experience and the ability to get productive in our stack quickly.
• Comfort building interfaces with navigation, forms, state management, and asynchronous data fetching.
• Experience integrating APIs and authentication, including handling loading states, failed requests, retries, and unreliable connections.
• Ability to debug across the interface, network requests, and application state. You can trace a problem to its cause and verify the fix.
• Good engineering habits around Git, code review, testing, and maintainable code. You test the experience on a device.
• Comfort instrumenting user behavior and using analytics to evaluate a feature after it ships.

Responsibilities

• Product features from the initial idea through prototyping, implementation, and release.
• Experiences across onboarding, conversation practice, feedback, and progression that help people find value and want to return.
• Turning a loosely defined problem into a concrete experience. Making decisions about the flow, interactions, and details along the way.
• Using AI tools to build and test ideas quickly, while understanding the code and checking that the result works.
• Working with design and engineering to bring features to production, including the edge cases, performance, and polish.
• Talking to users, watching where they struggle, and using funnels, retention data, and experiments to decide what to improve.
• Following through after launch: fixing problems, measuring results, and revisiting decisions when the evidence changes.

Skills

React Native/Expo

Mobile development

API integration

Authentication

Debugging

Analytics

Version control

Tools

React Native

Expo

TypeScript

TanStack Query

Zustand

LiveKit

PostHog

Sentry

Job description

Quippy helps people practice the conversations they keep replaying in their head. Short, realistic practice sessions, honest feedback, and a curriculum that adapts to you. We're backed by Y Combinator (F26), live on the App Store, and growing.

We're hiring a Founding Product Engineer to work directly with the founder and own meaningful parts of the product. That means figuring out what to build, making it work, and finding out whether it made the experience better.

You should enjoy thinking about why people use a product as much as how it's built. When someone drops out of onboarding or comes back every day, you'll want to understand why and do something with what you learn.

What you'll own

• Product features from the initial idea through prototyping, implementation, and release.
• Experiences across onboarding, conversation practice, feedback, and progression that help people find value and want to return.
• Turning a loosely defined problem into a concrete experience. Making decisions about the flow, interactions, and details along the way.
• Using AI tools to build and test ideas quickly, while understanding the code and checking that the result works.
• Working with design and engineering to bring features to production, including the edge cases, performance, and polish.
• Talking to users, watching where they struggle, and using funnels, retention data, and experiments to decide what to improve.
• Following through after launch: fixing problems, measuring results, and revisiting decisions when the evidence changes.

Who we're looking for

• You've built something people can use and can walk us through the decisions you made. A personal app or side project counts.
• You have strong product judgment. You can explain why a feature should exist, who it helps, and what would make it worth building now.
• You notice the details that make an app feel good: the wording of a button, an awkward transition, a slow response, or a screen that asks too much.
• You can take an ambiguous goal and turn it into working software without waiting for a complete spec.
• You're a capable programmer who can understand, debug, and maintain what you ship, including code produced with AI.
• You move quickly and make sensible tradeoffs. You can cut scope to test an idea sooner while protecting the parts users need to trust.
• You're curious about consumer behavior and can connect product decisions to activation, retention, and revenue.
• You finish things, raise blockers early, and are straightforward about what works and what still needs attention.
• You're willing to challenge a product decision, explain your reasoning, and change your mind when users prove you wrong.

Technical skills

• Experience with React Native and Expo, or substantial mobile development experience and the ability to get productive in our stack quickly.
• Comfort building interfaces with navigation, forms, state management, and asynchronous data fetching.
• Experience integrating APIs and authentication, including handling loading states, failed requests, retries, and unreliable connections.
• Ability to debug across the interface, network requests, and application state. You can trace a problem to its cause and verify the fix.
• Good engineering habits around Git, code review, testing, and maintainable code. You test the experience on a device.
• Comfort instrumenting user behavior and using analytics to evaluate a feature after it ships.

Experience with animations and gestures, real-time voice, LLM integrations, subscriptions, or mobile releases would be useful. Our stack includes React Native, Expo, TypeScript, TanStack Query, Zustand, LiveKit, PostHog, and Sentry. Familiarity with every library is not required.

This is a hands-on founding role with a fast pace. You'll help shape the roadmap and spend much of your time building it. You'll have room to own larger parts of the product as the company grows.

Competitive salary and meaningful founding equity.