Product Engineer

Syndesus; New York (NY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Unlimited PTO

Daily lunch and dinner provided after

Job summary

Syndesus is building an AI‑driven recruiting platform and is seeking an engineer who will own the product end‑to‑end. You’ll develop recruiter tools, candidate review experiences, and related features while partnering directly with the founder to shape the roadmap and team composition.

You’ll join a fast‑moving early‑stage company with strong growth and a mission to redefine how talent is matched to opportunities.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of full‑stack product experience, owning end‑to‑end delivery.
• Product‑minded professional who cares about customer value and business impact.
• Exceptional attention to detail in design and interaction.
• Strong fundamentals across modern full‑stack web technologies.
• Experience at fast‑growing, product‑driven startups (early‑stage preferred).

Responsibilities

• Create the product layer that makes the AI useful and usable.
• Turn complex workflows into instant, delightful flows.
• Build the platform recruiters rely on to run their business and drive placements.
• Design experiences for companies to review candidates and provide feedback.
• Talk to users frequently to inform product decisions.
• Collaborate with founder to determine what to build and who to bring on.

Skills

Full-stack development

Product mindset

Attention to detail

Strong fundamentals

Startup experience

Job description

About Our Client

Our client is using AI to accelerate how the world’s best talent finds the right problems to solve.

The bottleneck in recruiting isn’t sourcing — it’s data. Candidate data is poor and getting noisier (self-reported, outdated, now AI-inflated). But recruiters hold high-quality, real-time signal because they talk to candidates every day. That’s why companies spend more than $800B per year on recruiting. The problem is that this signal is fragmented and unusable at scale.

Our client’s first product aggregates signals from hundreds of recruiters and uses AI to instantly match their candidates to roles, giving companies unprecedented reach without the usual pain of managing external partners.

They give recruiters a business-in-a-box that lets them earn more while doing what they do best: building relationships and knowing their candidates deeply. In return, the company gets proprietary data. Their AI structures signal from real recruiter‑candidate context that doesn’t exist on LinkedIn or resumes. Every submission, every rejection, and every hire feeds a self‑improving AI matchmaking engine.

They believe the future of recruiting is human authenticity paired with AI efficiency. Great recruiters have a critical role to play, and this platform is built to empower them.

Long‑term, our client is building the infrastructure layer for how talent meets opportunity.

Why You Should Join

This is a generational opportunity to rethink how recruiting works — and the path to doing so is significantly de‑risked:

• Exponential growth: The company has product‑market fit and is growing rapidly, supporting hundreds of candidates, recruiters, and employers every day. They’ve grown 10x in under a year with a 3-person team.
• AI‑first business model: The approach is distinctly enabled by AI, and the business gets stronger as foundation models improve. They’re building durability through cross‑sided network effects that compound over time.
• Real ownership: It’s still “day 0.” You’ll shape what the company looks like and how far it goes. Your input will define the vision, product, team, and execution. What you build now becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
• Top‑tier investors: They’ve raised over $5M from leading venture funds and angel investors with track records backing category‑defining companies.
• Massive ceiling: The recruiting industry is worth more than $800B and is broken. The scope is as big as you want it to be.

Market demand is pulling the company forward. They’re looking for people who are excited about high ownership, high velocity, and high impact. There’s an enormous amount to build — and the scope only gets bigger. You will never be bored.

If they succeed, every company finds the right people the moment they need them, every person finds meaningful work without friction, and the pace of innovation changes forever.

About the Role

As one of the first engineers, you’ll own the product end‑to‑end — the tools recruiters use to find and submit candidates, the experience companies have when reviewing and hiring, and everything in between.

The cold start problem has already been solved. Hundreds of users generate thousands of data points every day. The foundation is there — now comes the fun part: endless room to build, and you’ll shape what that looks like.

You’ll take full ownership of the product — what gets built, how it works, and how it feels. This isn’t a role where you inherit a roadmap. You’ll collaborate directly with the founder to figure out what to build, how to build it, and who else to bring onto the team.

The role will roughly split into:

• ~70% core recruiter product (dashboard, flows, UX iteration)
• ~20% adjacent internal tools / light ops‑enabling features
• ~10% growth engineering (signups, activation, retention, SEO, billing)

Key Responsibilities

• Creating the product layer that makes the AI useful and usable
• Turning complex, manual workflows into flows that feel instant and effortless
• Building the platform recruiters run their entire business on — and shipping features that directly increase their placements and earnings
• Designing the experience companies use to review candidates and give feedback
• Talking to users frequently
• Building new product surfaces as the company expands to new user types and verticals
• And much more, which you’ll define

Requirements

• 4+ years of full‑stack experience building products end‑to‑end — you thrive when you own a codebase top to bottom
• A product mindset: you care deeply about the customer and the business, not just the code
• Obsessive attention to detail in design and interaction — you push for experiences that feel easy and delightful
• Strong programming fundamentals and fluency across modern full‑stack web technologies
• Engineering experience at fast‑growing, product‑driven companies where you had to figure things out without a playbook (ideally at early‑stage companies)

Logistics

• Location: New York City office (in‑person)
• Compensation: $170K — $250K + equity
• Openings: 1–2 hires across varying levels of seniority
• Benefits: Health insurance; unlimited PTO; daily lunch and dinner provided after 7pm

Interview Process

1. Intro Call (30 min): High‑level screening and mutual introduction
2. Technical Interview (60 min): Open‑ended product challenge assessing problem breakdown and solution thinking
3. Behavioral Deep‑Dive (60 min): In person
4. On‑Site (full day): Work through real problems together in person and get a feel for the collaboration style