Founding Product Engineer
Role Description
You’ll be Rocket’s first Product Lead: a modern AI-native builder, solo IC, and product partner to the CEO who turns ideas into impact fast. You’ll deeply understand K-16 school admins through customer conversations, data, and direct engagement, then own the full product lifecycle with clarity, conviction, and urgency. You’ll prototype quickly, ship faster, align sales, marketing, CS, engineering, and leadership around the roadmap, and help build the systems that keep everyone moving without needing to be in every room.
Role Responsibilities
Building & Shipping Delightful Experiences (~60%): Rapid agentic prototyping, Define and enforce a "definition of done", Personally own and validate the product lifecycle through customer adoption, Say “No” - Protect the team's focus by making data driven prioritization calls, Guide the engineering team towards building faster tooling that enables you to build & ship
Product Adoption (~20%): Track product performance, Understand customer behavior, Monitor market trends, emerging technologies, and competitor movements
Product Roadmap (~10%): Convert the long-term strategy into an executable roadmap, Own the roadmap with conviction, even when pressure comes from leadership, sales, or customers, Pressure-test the roadmap with customer signals, usage data, and market insight to challenge assumptions and surface blind spots
Communication & Alignment (~10%): Exude energy, innovation, excitement with a “yes and” mentality, Maintain team focus on the product roadmap and long term strategy, Build systems that collect and process product feedback without manual intervention, Embed critical thinking, judgement, product taste into the agentic pipelines to scale product communication
Requirements
- 5+ years shipping delightful SaaS products
- Current / recent $5m+ venture funded experience
- Expert builder (Claude Code, Replit, Loveable, Cursor, Figma, Photoshop)
- Portfolio / track record of products with daily usage
- Experience working directly with a founder/CEO as a strategic partner
- Experience designing product processes from 0 to 1
- Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science or related field (a plus)
- Open source contributions (a plus)