Staff Product Engineer – Full Stack / AI Products
Location: San Francisco, CA – Hybrid, 2–3 days/week preferred
Contract: 6-month W2 contract with potential to extend
Pay: $230–$255/hour W2, based on experience
Travel: Candidates outside the Bay Area may be considered and should be able to travel to San Francisco approximately once per month for a 2–3 day team meetup
Russell Tobin is supporting a leading AI technology organization in hiring a Staff Product Engineer to build high-impact internal products used by teams operating at the forefront of artificial intelligence.
This is not a traditional feature-delivery engineering role. We’re looking for a highly product-minded engineer who can operate at the intersection of engineering, product, design, and users. You’ll work directly with stakeholders to understand how they work, identify patterns across their needs, and turn those insights into scalable products, platforms, and abstractions.
You’ll own outcomes—not simply execute against a predefined roadmap.
What You’ll Do
- Rapidly design, prototype, and ship full-stack products and features across backend, frontend, and infrastructure
- Work directly with users and stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, and opportunities
- Lead product discovery and translate ambiguous user needs into technical solutions
- Identify patterns across individual requests and turn them into reusable primitives, platforms, middleware, or capabilities
- Build intuitive tools that give less-technical users greater autonomy and flexibility
- Make thoughtful product, architecture, and prioritization decisions rather than relying solely on predefined specifications
- Iterate quickly based on user feedback and changing business needs
- Own projects from initial discovery through implementation, launch, and iteration
- Adopt new tools, frameworks, and technical domains as products evolve
- Collaborate closely with highly technical, cross-functional teams in a fast-paced environment
What We’re Looking For
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally with significant full-stack ownership
- Strong proficiency across the stack; experience with Python, TypeScript, and React is particularly relevant
- Demonstrated ability to independently take a product from an ambiguous idea through production launch
- Strong product instincts and the ability to balance technical decisions with user and business needs
- Experience conducting product discovery or working directly with customers, users, or internal stakeholders
- Ability to recognize the broader platform or abstraction behind an individual feature request
- Experience building reusable platforms, internal products, frameworks, primitives, or tools that other teams build upon
- Strong systems design and architectural thinking
- Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and operating in ambiguous environments
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively in group settings
- Comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy, ownership, and accountability
Candidates We’re Particularly Interested In
Strong candidates often come from environments where engineers are expected to operate well beyond the boundaries of a traditional software engineering role.
We’re especially interested in engineers with backgrounds such as:
- Early-stage or high-growth technology companies
- Former founders or founding/early engineers
- Product engineering organizations
- Customer-facing engineering or highly user-oriented product development
- Roles combining technical implementation with product discovery
- Experience owning both the technical and functional aspects of a product
- Software or AI product environments where rapid iteration and ambiguity are the norm
- Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development or collaborating with AI systems as part of the engineering workflow
Experience exclusively within highly segmented, large-scale engineering organizations may be less aligned unless you can demonstrate significant end-to-end product ownership, direct user exposure, and experience operating autonomously.
What Success Looks Like
You don’t just ask, “What should I build?”
You ask:
- What problem is the user actually trying to solve?
- Is this an individual request or evidence of a broader pattern?
- What abstraction would solve this for many users?
- What is the simplest version we can ship to learn quickly?
- Did what we built actually improve the user’s workflow?
The strongest engineers for this team are equally comfortable discussing a user workflow, making a product decision, designing a system, and then getting into the code to build it.
Interview Process
The interview process consists of three rounds:
- Experience, Goals & Discussion – Background, product mindset, career goals, and questions
- Systems Design – Architecture and systems-thinking exercise
- Hands-On Coding – Coding exercise using Python or TypeScript
Location & Travel
San Francisco Bay Area candidates are strongly preferred, with an expectation of working from the San Francisco office approximately 2–3 days per week.
Exceptional candidates outside the Pacific Time Zone may also be considered. Candidates based outside the Bay Area should be comfortable traveling to San Francisco approximately once per month for a 2–3 day in-person team meetup.
Russell Tobin offers eligible employee’s comprehensive healthcare coverage (medical, dental, and vision plans), supplemental coverage (accident insurance, critical illness insurance and hospital indemnity), 401(k)-retirement savings, life & disability insurance, an employee assistance program, legal support, auto, home insurance, pet insurance and employee discounts with preferred vendors.
Equal Employment OpportunityRussell Tobin is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of the race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, reproductive health decision making, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.
Fair Chance EmploymentRussell Tobin is a Fair Chance employer. We consider all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable state and local Fair Chance laws and ordinances, including, the California Fair Chance Act and all applicable local Fair Chance ordinances.
AccommodationsWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants and employees with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, or to perform the essential functions of this role, please contact us.
Only applicable for San Francisco Candidates: Under the San Francisco Lactation in the Workplace Ordinance, we will provide written notice of lactation accommodation rights, and this notice will automatically be given upon hiring, any inquiry of parental leave or lactation accommodation.
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