Product Engineer

Specter; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Specter in New York City is seeking a frontend-focused product engineer who cares about UX and polish as much as function. You'll own major surfaces end-to-end—review and approval flows, logs, customer data surfaces, and the reporting dashboard—and ship features that actually help finance teams review, approve, and explain work.

You'll design with code, mock in Figma if helpful, but the bar is the shipped product.

Qualifications

• Strong frontend (React, TypeScript) with real backend capability.
• Empathy for the user, especially non-technical audiences.
• Genuine curiosity about how accounting actually works.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of major surfaces: the review and approval flow, the agent communications log, the interfaces that show what the system knows about each customer, the reporting dashboard.
• Design with code. Mock in Figma if you want, but the bar is what ships in production. Iteration speed matters more than fidelity of the mock.
• Make the product feel obvious. Finance teams shouldn't need a training session to use it. Onboarding should be the product, not a separate experience.
• Sit in on customer calls. Ship the fix before the call ends when you can. The customers who feel heard are the customers who renew and expand.
• Push back on bad ideas, including ours. The job is to make the product better, not to translate specs.

Skills

Strong frontend (React, TypeScript)

Design sense

Empathy for users

Accounting curiosity

PostgreSQL query plan reading

Tools

React

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

Job description

The role
Specter's customers are CFOs, controllers, and VPs of Finance. Their expertise is finance, not software, and they have little tolerance for ambiguity, extra work, or unexplained automation. They evaluate our product the way anyone evaluates software they have to use every day: does this make my job easier, or is it one more tab I have to keep open. The product engineer makes sure the answer is the first one, and keeps making sure as the product grows.
You'll own surfaces of the product end to end, with a heavy emphasis on UX, polish, and the parts of the experience that turn a useful tool into the first place a finance team goes to review, approve, and explain work. The bar isn't "works" - the bar is "the customer's team chooses to open Specter before they open their ERP."

What you'll do

• Take ownership of major surfaces: the review and approval flow, the agent communications log, the interfaces that show what the system knows about each customer, the reporting dashboard.
• Design with code. Mock in Figma if you want, but the bar is what ships in production. Iteration speed matters more than fidelity of the mock.
• Make the product feel obvious. Finance teams shouldn't need a training session to use it. Onboarding should be the product, not a separate experience.
• Sit in on customer calls. Ship the fix before the call ends when you can. The customers who feel heard are the customers who renew and expand.
• Push back on bad ideas, including ours. The job is to make the product better, not to translate specs.
  

What we look for

• Strong frontend (React, TypeScript) with real backend capability. You can stand up an endpoint without asking, and you can read a Postgres query plan.
• Demonstrated design taste. Either you have a design background, or your past work speaks for itself when we look at it.
• Empathy for the user, especially the non-technical one. You can sit through a customer demo and watch where they hesitate.
• Genuine curiosity about how accounting actually works. You don't need to come in knowing what a journal entry is; you need to be the kind of person who wants to learn.
  

Nice to have

• Built tools for finance, ops, or legal teams.
• Strong opinions on the difference between minimal UI and empty UI.
• Worked on a product where the user is paid to be careful - domains like accounting, healthcare, or compliance reward this.