Product Engineer, Core

About the Role

Key is building an AI-native professional intelligence platform, offering warm intros, elite communities, and an agent (Kai) that handles tasks effectively. We’re moving fast, shipping constantly, and the biggest challenge is translating messy user needs into reliable, user-friendly software.

Responsibilities

• Own features end-to-end: from understanding user needs to design, implementation, and measuring success.
• Build the product with ownership: take a feature from intuition to design, code, and measurement, iterating until it’s genuinely useful.
• Work directly with users: understand their pain points and translate feedback into actionable improvements.
• Debug infrastructure as needed, even during off-hours, and support users with new capabilities.
• Partner with founders on critical system components that shape the company’s direction.
• Raise the team’s bar: mentor, review, and help engineers improve quality and speed.

Requirements

• Experience shipping production software at startup pace (end-to-end delivery, not just feature work).
• Systems thinking with a focus on product taste: ability to reason about architecture and obsess over user experience details.
• Comfortable moving from user context to implementation.
• Ability to debug across the stack, from application behavior to infrastructure.
• Fluency across the stack with skill in making tradeoffs based on product needs, not familiarity.

Qualifications

• Experience building AI-enabled products balancing reliability, latency, and user experience (preferred).
• Mentorship experience through code reviews, pairing, or technical guidance (preferred).

Who Thrives Here

• Enjoys being close to users and treats feedback as input for engineering decisions.
• Thrives in ambiguity, iteration, and turning “it should work” into “it does work.”
• Switches seamlessly between technical debugging and user-facing outcomes.
• Focuses on raising team quality through mentorship and thoughtful reviews.

The Team

This is a 100% in-office role in Palo Alto, working ~5 days/week alongside the founders. You’ll collaborate directly with founders and engineers who prioritize shipping and excellence. The pace is fast, with a tight feedback loop between users, product, and engineering.

Pay

$65K–$110K + generous equity

Benefits

• 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 can demonstrate how you turned user needs into working software, we want to hear from you.