Staff Product Engineer

Job description

We're building a new system of record for finance, one that understands not just the numbers, but the business context behind them. At its core is our Operational Ledger: a financial data layer that preserves every event, calculation, policy, source, and decision behind the financials, rather than reducing them to contextless entries. Questions that once took weeks to answer become as routine as a Google search: *Why did margins change? Which customers are actually profitable? How are we tracking against budget?* We're not bolting AI onto legacy software. Quanta was built from the ground up around granular financial data, flexible primitives, and systems that agents can safely understand and act on. We've spent years closing the books for real, fast-growing companies and turning what we learn into product. We've already replaced much of what QuickBooks and NetSuite can do and the manual work surrounding them. Customers are now turning off legacy accounting systems and moving to Quanta. We're still early. The problems are hard, the ambition is enormous, and there's no playbook for what we're building. ## **The Team** We're a small, tight-knit team working together in person in downtown San Francisco. Our team brings together deep expertise in engineering and finance. We've built accounting systems at Affirm, ledgers at Stripe and Robinhood, launched products from 0→1, scaled infrastructure processing billions of dollars, built finance functions, and closed the books under real operating pressure. We understand our customers because we have been in their shoes. Quanta's earliest product was built around a few principles we still value: get to learning as quickly as possible, find the simplest solution that works, and build alongside real users and real-world edge cases. Quanta is for people who want ownership, prioritize learning and outcomes over conventional playbooks, and are comfortable figuring things out as they go. We move quickly, but we are building systems where correctness and trust matter deeply. That tension—moving fast while building durable foundations—is at the heart of the engineering problems we work on. As a **Staff Product Engineer**, you'll own some of Quanta's most important product problems from end to end. You'll work closely with customers, product, design, and other engineers to understand messy real-world workflows, determine what we should build, and turn those insights into simple, durable product experiences. You'll also raise the bar for how we build products across the engineering team—bringing strong technical judgment, product intuition, and a bias toward getting useful software into customers' hands. ## What We're Looking For - **10+ years of software engineering experience**, with significant experience owning and shipping customer-facing products in production. - **Strong product judgment.** You can take an ambiguous customer problem, understand what actually matters, and translate it into a product and technical solution. - **Strong technical depth** across application architecture, APIs, data modeling, backend systems, and the tradeoffs required to build reliable products. - **Excellent technical judgment** and an instinct for finding the simplest solution that solves the customer's problem without creating unnecessary complexity. - **High ownership.** You don't stop at shipping code—you care whether customers use what you built, whether it solved the problem, and what should happen next. - **Ability to create clarity from ambiguity** and independently identify the highest-leverage product and technical problems to solve. - **Strong communication and collaboration skills.** You can explain technical tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and work closely with engineers and non-engineers. **Bonus points** for experience building financial products, complex B2B software, workflow products, data-intensive applications, or other systems where correctness and trust are critical. ## This Role Is Not for You If… - You want a Staff role primarily focused on architecture, technical strategy, or advising other engineers rather than building and shipping products yourself. - You expect product requirements and specifications to be fully defined before engineering gets involved. - You think your responsibility ends when the code reaches production. We care deeply about adoption, customer outcomes, and what we learn after launch. - You aren't interested in talking directly with customers or developing a deep understanding of their workflows. - You optimize for shipping quickly without considering correctness, reliability, or trust. - You are uncomfortable working in a complex, judgment-heavy domain where building the right product requires understanding the underlying business context. - You are primarily interested in AI as a standalone feature rather than using it thoughtfully to solve real customer problems. - You prefer working independently or remotely from product, design, engineering, and domain experts. We work closely and in person by design. ## **Why Quanta** **Build a category, not just features.** We're not selling a slightly better version of an established tool. We're changing what companies should expect from their financial systems. **Join early enough to matter.** We're a small team. The things you discover, build, and prove can become part of how Quanta sells for years. **Learn directly from exceptional people.** You'll work alongside founders, engineers, and finance leaders who have built financial infrastructure and operated finance functions firsthand. **Grow with the company.** We're looking for someone who wants to master outbound, take on increasing ownership, and help us build the sales organization that comes next. ## **Benefits** - Competitive early-stage salary - Competitive early-stage equity - Health, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) - Take-what-you-need paid vacation - Commuter benefits - Wellness stipend - Paid lunches and dinners in the office - All the equipment and tools you need to do your best work