# AI Software Engineer, Product

**Company:** [Palona AI](http://jobs.workable.com/companies/b8Hd3jM1gxRnDUt4dzmeRY.md)
**Location:** New York, United States
**Workplace:** on site
**Employment type:** Full-time
**Department:** Product Engineering

[Apply for this job](http://jobs.workable.com/view/81978b62-a40c-408e-9806-3c9d1484fc40)

## Description

We are looking for a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in the real world. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems. The job begins with a customer or product problem and ends when the solution is operating successfully in production—not when a model call works locally.

You may work on voice ordering, reservations, catering, restaurant operations, client configuration, analytics, or entirely new agent capabilities. You will collaborate directly with product, design, customer-facing teams, and restaurant operators; make fast product and technical tradeoffs; and own the quality of the resulting experience.

Our stack includes Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js applications, real-time voice agents built with LiveKit, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and modern LLM, speech, and multimodal providers. Exact stack match is less important than full-stack range, product judgment, and a record of shipping.

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What you’ll own

-   Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration.
-   Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.
-   Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.
-   Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities.
-   Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints.
-   Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved.
-   Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience—not only within one layer of the stack.
-   Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness.
-   Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous.
-   Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring.

## Requirements

-   3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
-   Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.
-   Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack.
-   Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.
-   Product judgment: you can simplify scope, identify the highest-leverage user problem, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product.
-   Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems.
-   A strong quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience.
-   Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment.
-   AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment.

## Benefits

-   Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan.
-   Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable.
-   Family Leave
-   Short Term & Long Term Disability
-   Paid time off and company holidays.
-   Learning and development support.