About the role
Persist Ventures is looking for a highly capable AI Product Engineer who can take ownership of products from idea to production and ship exceptionally fast.
This is not a traditional software engineering role. We’re looking for someone who is AI-native, product- minded, highly autonomous, and obsessed with shipping. You should be comfortable taking a vague idea, turning it into a working product, using AI to accelerate development, and owning the entire technical lifecycle.
You’ll work closely with founders, product, design, and other engineers to build and launch AI-powered web and mobile products at high velocity.
What you'll do
- Take full technical ownership of products and features from concept through production.
- Rapidly prototype, build, iterate, and ship production-ready applications.
- Use AI coding tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and similar tools to dramatically accelerate development.
- Build AI-powered applications, agents, automations, and intelligent workflows.
- Design and integrate LLM APIs, AI agents, RAG systems, embeddings, vector databases, tool calling, and structured outputs.
- Build scalable full-stack applications using React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, and modern backend technologies.
- Develop APIs, real-time systems, integrations, and backend services.
- Work with databases such as PostgreSQL, Supabase, and vector databases.
- Integrate third-party APIs and services quickly and reliably.
- Deploy and operate applications using AWS, Vercel, Docker, and modern cloud infrastructure.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and production infrastructure.
- Work directly with UI/UX and product teams to turn ideas into polished user experiences.
- Debug, optimize, and improve products without waiting for someone else to tell you what to fix.
- Continuously identify opportunities to automate, simplify, and ship faster.
What we're looking for
- Strong experience building and shipping real production software.
- Excellent knowledge of TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Node.js.
- Strong understanding of APIs, databases, authentication, cloud infrastructure, and modern web architecture
- Hands-on experience building with LLMs and AI APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or similar.
- Experience with AI agents, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, function/tool calling, or AI automation.
- Comfortable with PostgreSQL/Supabase and modern cloud platforms.
- Familiarity with Docker, Git/GitHub, AWS, and Vercel.
- Experience integrating third-party APIs and building end-to-end products.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, security, scalability, and production systems.