Product Engineer, Core | Key AI

Product Engineer, Core | Key AI

Key is building an AI-native professional intelligence platform—warm intros, elite communities, and an agent (Kai) that actually does the work. We’re moving fast, shipping constantly, and the hardest part isn’t ideas—it’s turning messy user needs into reliable software that feels great to use.

Also a fit if you call yourself: Full-Stack Engineer, Product Engineer, Software Engineer

The Work

You’ll own features end-to-end—from the first “this is what users are really asking for” moment, through design, implementation, and the metrics that tell you whether it worked.

• Build the product like it’s yours: take a feature from intuition → design → code → measurement, and keep iterating until it’s genuinely useful
• Work directly with users: sit with them, understand what’s breaking (or missing), and translate that into what you build next
• Be comfortable in the deep end: debug infrastructure when it matters (yes, sometimes at 2am), then turn around and help users the next morning with a new capability
• Partner with the founders on the hardest problems: work closely with the founders on the parts of the system that define the company’s direction
• Raise the bar across the team: mentor, review, and help other engineers ship better—so quality and speed improve together

What You’ll Need

• You’ve shipped production software at a startup pace (this is non-negotiable—delivered something real end-to-end, not just “worked on features”)
• Systems thinking with product taste: you can reason about architecture and obsess over the details that make software feel right
• You can go from user context to implementation: you’re comfortable talking with users and then building the right thing
• You can debug across the stack: from application behavior down into infrastructure when something’s off
• You’re fluent across the stack and can make good tradeoffs based on what the product needs (not based on what’s familiar)

Even Better If

• You’ve built AI-enabled products where reliability, latency, and user experience all matter at the same time
• You’ve mentored other engineers through code reviews, pairing, or technical guidance

Who Thrives Here

• You like being close to users and you treat their feedback as input to engineering decisions—not as “requirements to implement.”
• You’re the kind of builder who enjoys owning the messy middle: ambiguity, iteration, and the moment where “it should work” becomes “it does work.”
• You can switch gears between deep technical debugging and clear user-facing outcomes without losing momentum.
• You want to raise the team’s quality, not just your own output—through thoughtful reviews and real mentorship.

The Team

This role is 100% in-office in Palo Alto. You’ll work ~5 days/week alongside the founders. You’ll work directly with the founders on the most important problems, alongside engineers who care about shipping and care about doing it well. The pace is real: we move quickly, we fix what breaks, and we keep the feedback loop tight between users, product, and engineering.

Comp and Benefits

$65K–$110K + generous equity

Benefits include:

• Health / Dental / Vision insurance
• Free food
• Free EV charging
• Paid time off
• Parental leave
• Professional development support

Non-Traditional Backgrounds

If you’ve built and scaled systems in any environment—startup, open source, or enterprise—and you can show how you turned user needs into working software, we want to hear from you.

How to Apply

Interested? You’ll start with a conversation with Navii, our hiring team’s AI—it's a chance for us to learn about you beyond your resume.