Product Engineer

Recruiting from Scratch; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity: 0.25%–0.5%

Health, dental, and vision insurance

20 days paid time off

Relocation assistance up to $10,000

Onsite office in New York, NY

Travel up to five days per month to 고객

Core tech stack exposure

Job summary

Recruiting from Scratch is seeking a Product Engineer for our New York, NY office. You will build core product and AI infrastructure for multiple manufacturing clients, shaping how AI agents automate front-office workflows.

You will own a major technical domain, work with founders and customers, and contribute production code from week one while traveling to facilities as needed.

Qualifications

• Proven track record shipping deep, technically complex products to paying customers.

Responsibilities

• Build core product and AI infrastructure across customers.

Skills

Software engineering

AI systems

AI pipelines

Backend architecture

Cloud environments

Production deployment

Customer collaboration

Relocation willingness

Tools

AWS Bedrock

EC2

S3

Google Vertex AI

Claude

GPT models

Next.js

React

Python

PostgreSQL

Job description

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/

Title of the role: Product Engineer

Location: New York, NY

Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage – $4.3M Raised

Office Type: Onsite

Company Description

We’re representing an early-stage AI company building software to modernize American manufacturing. Many manufacturers and distributors still rely on highly manual workflows for order entry, quoting, purchasing, accounts payable/receivable, and customer service. This company is building AI agents capable of automating those front-office operations.

The platform is already deployed across 22 customers, ranging from approximately 20-person businesses to Fortune 500 companies, and has processed more than 100,000 purchase orders. The seven-person company has raised $4.3M in seed funding and is currently growing approximately 30% month over month.

The long-term vision is ambitious: automate operations across 10,000 factories by 2035, beginning with order entry and quoting before expanding deeper into office and factory-floor workflows.

What You Will Do

• Build the core product and AI infrastructure used across every customer deployment.
• Develop and improve the company's agent runtime, extraction frameworks, integration frameworks, evaluation systems, and internal tooling.
• Build production AI systems involving multi-step agent pipelines, RAG, VLM-based extraction, and evals.
• Own a major technical domain outright, from architecture through production and ongoing support.
• Turn recurring customer integration requirements into reusable platform capabilities.
• Build frameworks that make new ERP integrations increasingly configurable rather than requiring one-off engineering work.
• Improve extraction and reasoning across complex manufacturing documents, including purchase orders and engineering materials.
• Work closely with Forward Deployed Engineers to turn lessons from individual customer deployments into scalable product capabilities.
• Design backend and data infrastructure capable of supporting the platform as customer volume grows.
• Work directly with founders, engineering leadership, and customers to determine what should be built next.
• Follow real customer workflows end-to-end to understand where software fails and how it can be improved.
• Occasionally travel directly to manufacturing facilities to observe users and workflows firsthand.
• Ship quickly—the expectation is to begin contributing production code within your first week.
• Within the first few months, you'll progress from understanding a real order end-to-end, to launching new customer use cases, to taking significant ownership over a core technical domain and the scalability of the broader platform.

Ideal Background

• Strong professional software engineering experience with a history of shipping deep, technically complex products to paying customers.
• Production experience building AI systems used by real customers, rather than exclusively prototypes or research projects.
• Hands-on experience with multi-step AI agent pipelines, RAG, VLM extraction, and evaluation systems.
• Broad architectural ability spanning backend systems, data infrastructure, and cloud environments.
• Experience owning systems through production deployment, operation, debugging, and customer support.
• Demonstrated ability to move quickly and independently in ambiguous environments.
• Strong product instincts and interest in solving real operational problems rather than optimizing solely for technical benchmarks.
• Comfortable working directly with customers and learning complex business workflows.
• Able to satisfy the company's U.S. person requirement under 22 CFR 120.62 due to ITAR-related customer data obligations.
• Based in New York or willing to relocate.
• Comfortable traveling up to approximately five days per month to customer manufacturing facilities.

Preferred

• Previous experience as a founder, co-founder, CTO, founding engineer, or similarly early technical hire.
• Experience building a company or meaningful product from the ground up.
• Early-stage startup experience with substantial individual ownership.
• Experience designing reusable technical platforms from requirements initially discovered through customer deployments.
• Experience with manufacturing software, industrial workflows, ERPs, MES systems, or similar operational technology.
• Experience building document extraction or multimodal AI systems.
• Familiarity with AWS Bedrock, EC2, S3, Google Vertex AI, Claude, or GPT models.
• Full-stack capabilities, including familiarity with Next.js and React.
• Experience designing secure, isolated customer environments.
• Interest in manufacturing and willingness to spend time directly with customers at their facilities.

Compensation and Benefits

• Equity: 0.25%–0.5%, with four-year vesting and a one-year cliff.
• Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 20 days of paid time off.
• Up to $10,000 in relocation assistance.
• Location: New York, NY.
• Office: Onsite.
• Expect approximately 50-hour workweeks in the office; weekend work is not required.
• Travel of up to approximately five days per month to customer manufacturing facilities.
• Core stack includes Python, PostgreSQL, AWS (Bedrock, EC2, S3), Google Vertex AI, Next.js, and React.
• AI stack uses frontier models including Claude and GPT, selecting models based on the specific task rather than standardizing on a single provider.
• Customer environments run in isolated AWS instances with models deployed inside those environments to address customer data requirements.
• Engineers operate with substantial autonomy—there is no traditional product manager assigning tickets or prescribing the weekly roadmap.
• Best suited for a highly independent engineer who wants technical co-founder-level ownership of a product that already has real customers and production usage.