Product Engineer

Job description

WHO WE ARE Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology. To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together: https://challenge.percepta.ai - Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research - Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows - Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives. Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company. ABOUT THE ROLE We're hiring Product Engineers to build cross-cutting products that become the foundation for multi-engagement tools that enable Perceptrons to more easily deliver their best work, and help to continue to show our differentiation. Most of Percepta's engineering is forward-deployed, and we believe it’s essential for you to get exposure o the field. Our operating model is: Someone embeds with a customer, learns their systems, and ships. That work is real and it's why customers trust us. The products that will generalize across customers don't get built well from a distance, and we are excited to invest in our product team to make sure we have deep focus on getting this right. In your first several months, you'll work alongside a customer team doing real delivery work as an applied AI engineer: shipping into their environment, sitting with their constraints, finding where the duct tape is. You understand that context is earned, and this is a mission to feel the pain of our engineers and clients in the field, and build a deep sense of empathy and understanding for what you’ll build next. Once you’ve had ample time to get a deep sense for the places we should invest, you'll have time that isn't attached to a customer contract to get a first working version of something in front of engineering leadership, and you should expect to make the case for it: Who it's for, why it matters past this one account, how it's built, what it does today. If it holds up, you own what comes next. Roadmap, rollout, adoption, all of it. A meaningful share of your time will be dedicated to exploring and creating product wherever you think the gap is; the rest goes at things we already believe need to exist. The bar for the former is that you can say who buys it, why now, and what it replaces. Two shapes of product come out of this, and you don't have to pick before you've seen an account up close: Vertical. Something deep in one industry. Operationalizing a hospital system, for example, where the product is inseparable from how that industry actually runs and the commercial story is specific. Horizontal. Something every deployment reaches for. Agent tooling, evaluation, deployment surfaces, the layer that makes the next engagement faster than the last. Same intake either way. Tell us in your application which one you're drawn to and we'll plan to speak with you more about your interest. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Embed with a customer team and ship production delivery work, so your product instincts come from somewhere real - Take an idea from nothing to something deployable and usable, and make the case for it to the people who'd have to bet on it - Turn that prototype into product: Generalize it, harden it, and get it adopted across more than one account - Own the roadmap, the rollout plan, and the outcomes for what you build - Build things your teammates can pick up and extend: Clear ownership, real interfaces, code that reads - Contribute the reusable parts back into Mosaic so the next deployment starts further along - Stay close to customers after launch, because adoption is the only proof that any of it worked WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5+ years building production software, ideally including something you took from zero to 1 - Fluency in Python and TypeScript. Our stack and our interview loop both live there, and ramping on the language while ramping on the domain is a bad trade for you - The kind of engineer who builds the abstraction when it doesn't exist yet, and who cares whether it's still usable six months later - Real product instinct: You can say who a thing is for, why it matters to them, and how it gets sold - High agency in ambiguous problem spaces, paired with the judgment to know when to align instead of sprint - Strong communication. You'll spend a lot of this job convincing people, some of whom are customers - Comfort being in front of customers periodically and shipping into someone else's environment NICE TO HAVE - Workflow orchestration or task execution frameworks - Experience building internal developer platforms - Deep domain background in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, or financial services - Prior forward-deployed, consulting, or design partner work We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. If this excites you, let's chat, even if you don't meet all of the qualifications above. OUR VALUES Dream bigger: We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will. Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care. Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy. Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos. Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.