Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Rockstar; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier salary and equity

Great healthcare

Dinner at the office

Unlimited Celsius

Travel across the USA to spend time w/

Job summary

Rockstar is seeking a senior product engineer to own hands-on architecture at the intersection of AI, product, and distributed systems. You will tackle ambiguous customer problems, craft focused architectures, and ship reliable systems in production.

You will build AI workers across the stack—from customer experiences to long-running agent workflows and integrations with legacy ERPs/CRMs. Expect leadership of critical initiatives, improved performance, and evolving infrastructure as models grow.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product engineering experience with shipped systems.
• Strong systems thinker with ability to define clear boundaries.
• Product-minded with focus on customer value and measurable impact.
• Clear communicator across technical and non-technical teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex product initiatives from discovery to production.
• Translate requirements into architecture documents and plans.
• Build core AI product experiences and agent workflows.
• Improve performance, reliability, and cost as usage grows.
• Design and operate distributed systems including queues and observability.
• Define technical strategy across models, context management, infra.
• Raise the engineering bar with simple design, testing, reviews, and documentation.
• Mentor engineers and create patterns, documentation, and feedback loops.

Skills

Product engineering

Systems thinking

Communication

Mentorship

In-person collaboration

Tools

TypeScript

React

Node.js

PostgreSQL

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

Rockstar is recruiting for a fast-moving, venture-backed startup that builds AI workers for non-production departments in American manufacturing. The company is backed by a16z Speedrun and angels from Brex, Xwing, and Betterment, and is on a mission to rebuild the digital foundation of American manufacturing.

The Role

This is a hands-on senior individual-contributor role at the intersection of applied AI, product, and distributed systems. The role holder will take ambiguous customer problems and complex product initiatives, turn them into focused architectures, and ship simple, reliable systems in production.

They will build AI workers across the stack, from customer-facing experiences to long-running agent workflows and integrations with legacy ERPs and CRMs. They will lead 0 1 initiatives, improve agent performance and reliability, help set model and agent strategy, and evolve infrastructure as customer usage and model capabilities grow.

Technical leadership at the company means writing and operating core product code while raising the bar for the team through clear technical writing, thoughtful code review, mentorship, and better developer tooling. The stack is TypeScript end-to-end with React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL, running on AWS and Kubernetes.

What You’ll Do

• Lead complex product initiatives from customer discovery and technical design through implementation, rollout, and production operation
• Turn broad product requirements into focused architecture documents, clear tradeoffs, and incremental execution plans
• Build core AI product experiences and the agent workflows, tools, and integrations behind them
• Improve agent performance, reliability, and cost as usage grows and new models arrive
• Design and operate distributed systems, including queues, workers, observability, and failure recovery
• Help set technical strategy across models, agent architecture, context management, infrastructure, and developer experience
• Raise the engineering bar through simple design, testing, code review, and operational follow-through
• Mentor engineers and create patterns, documentation, and feedback loops that make the team more effective
  

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years of product engineering experience and a track record of designing, shipping, and operating important systems; experience across both a high-growth startup and a scaled engineering organization is a plus
• You are a strong systems thinker who can reduce a complex domain to clear boundaries and maintainable software
• You have a product mindset: you learn how customers work, notice patterns, and connect technical decisions to customer value
• You care deeply about code quality and reliability, but avoid abstraction or complexity for its own sake
• You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical teammates and make others better through writing, code review, mentorship, and candid feedback
• You form thoughtful opinions about fast-moving AI technology and choose models, architectures, and context strategies based on evidence
• You are ambitious, resourceful, action-oriented, and team-first; you care about strengthening American manufacturing and are excited to work in person five days a week in NYC
  

Bonus Points

• Deep experience with TypeScript, Node.js, React, or PostgreSQL
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, queues, streaming, caching, retries, consistency, and observability
• Experience building a large surface area of third-party integrations, especially with legacy systems
• Experience building software for manufacturing or another operationally complex industry
  

About the Company

Revitalize an industry. Rebuild America's manufacturing backbone.

America builds satellites, jet engines, semiconductors, and more with world-class precision, but the software running factory offices is decades behind. Estimators, procurement teams, and engineers still lose hours to spreadsheets, PDFs, and manual data entry.

The company builds AI workers for non-production departments, such as inside sales, quoting, and procurement. By removing back-office bottlenecks, it helps US manufacturers move faster, grow, and compete globally.

The company is backed by a16z Speedrun and angels from Brex, Xwing, and Betterment. Join in rebuilding the digital foundation of American manufacturing.

The Founders

Co-Founder & CEO: Began his career at Acer and Northrop Grumman, then advised industrial companies at Bain. At Xwing, he helped scale the company and led GTM through its acquisition by Joby Aviation. He holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA from USC.

Co-Founder & CTO: Began at Meta, then founded a YC-backed startup that was acquired by a media company. He later became a founding engineer on a major spend management product, and ultimately the Head of Engineering for that organization. He holds a BS in Computer Science from USC.

How the Company Works

• In person every day in NYC for high-bandwidth collaboration
• Talks to users constantly: the company builds with manufacturers, not for them
• Owns outcomes end-to-end and drives solutions without waiting for permission
• Prefers simple, incremental systems that solve the real problem and are easy to operate
  

The Company’s Values

• Here to Win: The company is building to help American manufacturers, its customers, the company, and its teammates win at the highest level.
• There's Always a Way: The company is relentlessly resourceful, takes ownership of constraints, and finds a path forward when others stop.
• Truth Over Comfort: The company chooses honesty over ego, surfaces reality quickly, and changes course when the facts demand it.
• Act Now: The company moves fast, trusts its instincts, and corrects course as it goes.
• Step Up: The company acts like founders, fills gaps, fixes problems, and follows through until the work is done.
• The Team. The Team. The Team.: The company puts the team first, pushes and supports each other, shares wins, and owns failures together.
  

Comp & Benefits

• Top-tier salary and equity
• Great healthcare
• Dinner at the office
• Unlimited Celsius
• Travel across the USA to spend time with customers on their shop floors
  

Location

Onsite in New York City, five days a week.