Senior Product Engineer

Mappa; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive cash compensation

Close collaboration with founding team

Senior engineering craft and data rig

Job summary

Mappa is hiring a Senior Product Engineer who will own product-driven features and AI infrastructure. You will ship MVPs, robust backend services, and data layers, turning high-level product direction into scalable systems.

Expect ownership, fast execution, and close collaboration with the Head of Product in a fully remote, US-focused environment. You’ll work with a senior team, shaping architecture, data models, and pipelines that power content distribution and analytics across formats.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, or Core Generalist.
• Excellent, highly confident English communication skills.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PostgreSQL, and TypeScript/React; strong async processing and database optimization.

Responsibilities

• Translate product direction and prototypes into MVP code and backend services.
• Design multi-vertical automated content processing and distribution pipelines.
• Build agent- and data-friendly interfaces for high-volume, unstructured data.
• Extend the core platform to support experiments without parallel stacks.
• Optimize performance and reliability, including asynchronous processing.
• Collaborate daily with the Head of Product and senior engineers.

Skills

Python

TypeScript/React

PostgreSQL

Asynchronous processing

Data structures

System design

Tools

GitHub

Notion

Slack

Job description

About Company

Company is an AI-native distribution company for creators and media IP. We're building a platform that takes raw content, decides what to post, where, and when, renders it, and learns from what performs — think Palantir for social media and the creator economy.

We're organized around content verticals (video, audio, and more to come). Each vertical plugs into the same core platform: a unified content and performance graph that gets smarter with every campaign we run. The team is small, senior, and moves fast — YC-style shipping cadence with Palantir-style rigor on systems and data.

The Role

We are looking for a brilliant, high-seniority Senior Product Engineer who is a true high agency generalist and passionate about AI.

In this role, you will have a team-wide impact, owning the intersection of product-driven features and core data/AI infrastructure. You'll work closely and daily with our Head of Product to shape what we build and a team of senior teammates to work through architecture decisions, but the engineering execution is yours. You'll turn high-level product direction into shipped software — taking user flows and prototypes to turn them into MVPs, robust backend services, and the data layers that power them.

This isn't a role where you wait for specs. You'll shape them alongside product, identify tradeoffs early, and build lean while thinking about systems that scale.

Core Projects & Responsibilities

Architect Multi-Vertical Pipelines: Design and build automated content processing and distribution pipelines across multiple formats.

Build Agent- & Data-Friendly Products: Work closely with our data engineering infrastructure to ensure our frontends, backends, and in-house AI agents interact seamlessly with high-volume, unstructured datasets. We’re in the business of agentic feedback loops, and building our platform from the ground up around them.

Evolve the Core Platform: Extend and optimize our shared infrastructure (content models, job orchestration, database layers, and analytics) to support new product experiments without building parallel stacks.

Ship High-Impact MVPs: Turn proposals into skeletons and production-ready code in weeks, not quarters. Maintain a tight feedback loop with product and the rest of the engineering team.

Scale What Works: When a product experiment hits, you are the person thinking about reliability, system performance, API efficiency, and how to 10x the volume without a full rewrite.

Who Succeeds Here

You are a high-agency generalist: You have strong product instincts but think like a systems engineer. You are highly proficient in Python and TypeScript/React, and you are opinionated about data structures.

You think in data and scale: You know how to handle high volumes of data, clean performance metrics, and build systems that run unattended in production.

You love collaborating with product: You're not trying to be the PM — you're trying to be the engineer who makes the PM's job easy. You push back thoughtfully, surface technical trade-offs early, and ship things that match the intent behind the spec.

You are culturally fluent in US digital media: Native-level English is a priority. You actively consume online media, understand modern creator ecosystems, and have real opinions on where AI is disrupting content distribution (and where it isn't).

You build for the future but execute fast: You know when to stub and when to structure. You write the proposal before the code, state your assumptions, and proceed without waiting to be unblocked.

Our Stack

Backend: Python, Postgres, Google Cloud Storage

Frontend: TypeScript, React

Infra / Orchestration: Railway, Vercel, modern data orchestration tools

AI: Model-agnostic infrastructure leveraging major frontier models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), Vercel Gateway AI, OpenRouter.

Tools: Codex as our primary agent interface, GitHub, Notion, Slack and our internal agent harness.

How We Work

Proposal before code: A clear one-pager before any meaningful build — applies to everyone.

Assumptions, not questions: State what you're assuming and proceed. Only elevate when the answer materially changes architecture, system stability, or risk.

Written async by default: Fast pings in chat, but PRs and documentation for everything that matters.

We build fast, learn faster and have fun with it. We’re here to do the best work of our life and have fun doing it.

Requirements & Qualifications

Experience: 5+ years of experience as a Product Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, or Core Generalist, ideally within fast-paced startup environments or AI-centric companies.

Language: Excellent, highly confident English communication skills (comfortable pitching ideas, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and documenting technical processes).

Technical Depth: Advanced proficiency in Python, PostgreSQL, and TypeScript/React. Strong hands-on experience with asynchronous task processing and database optimization.

Nice to Have

Prior experience at an AI-native startup, media platform, or content/editorial tooling company.

Experience dealing with high-volume data ingestion or complex API integrations.

A personal project or open-source contribution you'll want to show us — ideally something showcasing automation or AI implementation.

What We Offer

Competitive cash compensation.

Close collaboration with a product-led founding team.

A senior team that takes engineering craft and data rigor seriously.

100% Remote (Working hours: US EST/PST overlap).

What we need you to tackle

We’re looking for a high-agency senior product engineer who combines strong product instincts with systems-level thinking. You should be highly proficient in Python and TypeScript/React, opinionated about data structures, and experienced with PostgreSQL, asynchronous task processing, and database optimization. You think in data and scale—handling high-volume ingestion, clean performance metrics, and building reliable systems that run unattended—while collaborating closely with product (not acting as a PM). Native-level English and cultural fluency with US digital media are important, along with a fast execution style that includes writing assumptions and short proposals before coding.

Non-negotiable hard skills

• A/V Engineering
• Audio Editing
• Audio Production
• Sound Engineering

Your day-to-day

• Translate product direction and prototypes into MVP code and backend services.
• Design and implement multi-vertical automated content processing and distribution pipelines.
• Build and maintain agent- and data-friendly interfaces that work reliably with high-volume, unstructured datasets.
• Extend the shared core platform (content models, job orchestration, database layers, analytics) to enable new experiments without parallel stacks.
• Optimize system performance and reliability, including asynchronous task processing and unattended production runs.
• Collaborate daily with the Head of Product and senior engineers to identify tradeoffs early and keep a tight feedback loop.

Nice to haves

• Design content/performance graphs and event schemas that support experimentation, analytics, and agentic feedback loops without forking stacks.
• Build resilient ingestion from heterogeneous media sources and APIs with batching, pagination, rate-limit handling, and schema normalization for unstructured data.
• Proactively improve reliability, latency, and throughput of APIs and pipelines; plan how to 10x volume without rewrites via profiling, caching, and efficient data access.