About the Company

Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed technology company transforming how people develop technical skills. Their platform serves a global community of more than 200,000 learners across 190+ countries and is built around a hands-on, project-based learning philosophy.

Instead of traditional courses, quizzes, and certifications, users gain practical experience by building real-world projects with modern AI technologies and development tools. As learners complete projects, they automatically create a portfolio of work that showcases their capabilities to employers and peers.

The company has experienced strong early traction, is led by a small, high-performing team, and is entering its next phase of growth with plans to scale significantly over the coming year.

About the Role

We are hiring a Staff Product Engineer to own the skill authentication roadmap end-to-end: shaping the product, making strong technical decisions, and shipping it. This is a high-ownership seat on a three-engineer team with no engineering management layer, working directly alongside the founders. The role demands full-stack depth, sharp product judgment, and the confidence to challenge direction with well-reasoned opinions.

What You'll Own

• Own the skill authentication roadmap end-to-end, from product shaping through technical decisions and production deployment
• Build and evolve backend systems: scalability, reliability, performance, and developer experience
• Lead core data model work and reduce tech debt on critical paths
• Build tooling and services for content creation, project automation, validations, and documentation
• Collaborate directly with product, frontend, support, and growth across the full engineering lifecycle
• Speak directly with NextWork learners to understand problems and validate decisions in production

Must-Have

1. 6+ years of professional engineering experience with evidence of rapid career progression
2. Full-stack engineering capability with meaningful backend depth, not frontend-heavy execution
3. Built something from zero to one with high ownership from development through testing and monitoring, not just ticket execution
4. Strong product judgment and clear prioritization, with a track record of articulating trade-offs and defending the reasoning
5. Confidence to challenge founders and stakeholders with well-reasoned opinions and reshape work for better outcomes
6. Mature, practical use of AI-assisted engineering in daily workflow
7. Based in Austin or willing to relocate; in-person 5 days a week near Nightcap, Austin

Nice-to-Have

• Local-first or privacy-sensitive architecture experience
• RAG experience
• Graph-based data modeling
• Backend experience in Go or Node/TypeScript
• Prior EdTech, creator economy, or community platform engineering experience
• Prior work at consumer or prosumer companies with a high engineering bar