Job Description

Join to apply for the Staff Backend Engineer, AI Enablement role at Productboard

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Join to apply for the Staff Backend Engineer, AI Enablement role at Productboard

Who We Are:

Productboard is where innovation meets impact. As a Unicorn company valued at $1.7B, we're revolutionizing product management with our platform, trusted by industry giants like Microsoft, Zoom, and UiPath. Our global presence spans from San Francisco to Prague, embodying a culture of agility and expertise. Productboard helps product teams understand user needs, prioritize what to build, and rally everyone around their roadmap. This includes

Who We Are:

Productboard is where innovation meets impact. As a Unicorn company valued at $1.7B, we're revolutionizing product management with our platform, trusted by industry giants like Microsoft, Zoom, and UiPath. Our global presence spans from San Francisco to Prague, embodying a culture of agility and expertise. Productboard helps product teams understand user needs, prioritize what to build, and rally everyone around their roadmap. This includes Productboard Pulse , our AI-powered solution for rapidly synthesizing customer feedback. This role is key to that vision, directly focusing on the success of Pulse and our broader AI initiatives.

Our culture is our cornerstone. We've cultivated an environment where your voice matters, your work impacts global product development, and your growth is paramount. We champion employee voice, impact, and growth, fostering a collaborative and supportive environment. Our outstanding eNPS score of 93 reflects our commitment to employee satisfaction and our deeply embedded values of empowerment, transparency, and continuous improvement.

About the Role:

Our Insights Experience team is at the heart of helping customers derive deep understanding from their user feedback, with Productboard Pulse as a flagship AI initiative. This platform is important for setting Productboard apart in its market by making sure our customers really understand what users need.

As a Staff Backend Engineer for AI Enablement on this team, you’ll take a pivotal leadership role: architecting and building features for Pulse, and enabling other engineering teams to use AI effectively for this initiative and related product goals. You'll build features using modern AI techniques like Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)—integral to Productboard Pulse. You’ll focus on designing and building robust backend systems and foundational services, integrating capabilities from our internal AI platform and leading external providers (like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic).

You'll do more than just code; you'll need to understand how your work helps our customers and influences our product direction, especially in driving the success of a strategic AI product like Pulse. You'll work with different functions, like product managers, designers, and other engineers, to bring your technical skills and understanding of product development together. This role is about making a real difference in how we build products and coming up with practical, scalable AI-driven solutions that matter to our users.

This role is based in our San Francisco office with an office-centric hybrid schedule. Along with most people at Productboard, you’ll work from this office in person on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays every week and have the option to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays when the context allows for it.

What You'll Achieve:

• Architect and Scale AI-Powered Backends: You’ll have a significant hand in designing, developing, and maintaining scalable backend systems (Kotlin, Ruby) that power Productboard Pulse. You will lead the architectural vision for integrating LLM capabilities, focusing on scalability, maintainability, and cost-effectiveness, directly impacting our users as you ship your contributions to production.
• Deliver Robust Product Functionality for Pulse: Take backend ownership for new Productboard Pulse features, from technical design and AI service integration through deployment and iteration. You’ll drive the technical execution of features that transform how product managers gain insights, ensuring high engineering quality and product impact.
• Lead and Enable AI Feature Development: Act as a technical leader and subject matter expert for LLM integration (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, etc.). You’ll develop and champion best practices, reusable patterns, and internal tooling to help product engineering teams efficiently build AI-powered features, providing mentorship and technical guidance.
• Strategic AI Service Integration & Optimization: Evaluate and select appropriate external LLM services for various use cases. You’ll design and implement strategies to optimize the performance, cost, and reliability of these integrations, particularly for Productboard Pulse, and develop common infrastructure to streamline access.
• Collaborate and Influence Technical Direction: Work alongside product managers, designers, frontend engineers, and our internal AI platform team. Your collaborative efforts and expert backend/AI integration advice will be essential in influencing product and technical strategy for Productboard Pulse and ensuring alignment on AI adoption.
• Solve Complex Technical Challenges: Bring your creativity and deep problem-solving skills to resolve challenging technical and architectural issues—integrating advanced third-party services, designing for multi-tenant AI systems, ensuring robust error handling, and managing the operational aspects of AI-driven features within Pulse.
• Drive Engineering Excellence: Champion and refine best practices for building high-quality, scalable product backends, particularly those incorporating AI. You’ll proactively identify opportunities for innovation and technical improvement.
• Continuously Learn, Grow, and Mentor: Experience personal and professional growth by developing your expertise in building sophisticated product features and working with modern backend technologies. You’ll stay at the forefront of advancements in LLMs and applied AI, sharing knowledge and mentoring other engineers, focusing on applications relevant to Productboard Pulse.

Skills You'll Bring:

• Proven Engineering Experience & Leadership: You bring over 8+ years of engineering experience, demonstrating a history of designing, building, and maintaining scalable backend systems for user-facing product features, with a proven track record of technical leadership.
• Product-Oriented AI Application Experience: You have significant practical experience and a strong understanding of applying modern AI techniques (LLMs from providers like OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic; methods like RAG and prompt engineering) to build effective product features, especially in contexts like feedback analysis and summarization relevant to Productboard Pulse. You can articulate trade-offs and guide teams in sound technical decisions.
• Pragmatic, User-Centric & Business-Oriented: Your focus is on balancing craft, speed, and business impact. You possess excellent product intuition, enjoy collaborating with product managers and designers, and can contribute strategically to how technology, especially AI, can solve user problems and achieve business goals. You consistently prioritize users and understand the importance of building reliable, trustworthy product experiences.
• Strategic Problem-Solver & Strong Technical Foundation: You excel at breaking down complex problems into manageable solutions, considering both technical and business implications. You have proficiency in backend languages (we primarily use Ruby and Kotlin; experience in similar languages like Python, Java, or Go is valuable) and a deep understanding of distributed system design, API development, data modeling, and extensive experience with scaling, optimizing, and operating backend systems, including managing costs for external AI services.
• Leadership, Enablement, and Mentorship: You have a demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and effectively enable teams to adopt new technologies or practices. Experience creating technical documentation, conducting workshops, or developing shared tools is highly desirable.
• Empathetic Communicator & Team Player: You articulate complex technical ideas, architectural decisions, and AI-related capabilities clearly to various audiences, both in writing and verbally. Collaborative by nature, you work effectively within diverse teams, respecting different viewpoints and finding compromise when necessary. Your commitment goes beyond personal achievement, focusing also on the growth and learning of your teammates.
• Adaptability and Passion for Learning: You are eager to take on new challenges and have a genuine desire to learn and adapt, especially regarding how new technologies can improve products. You prioritize effective, efficient solutions, are keen to understand what makes product features succeed, and actively explore innovative ways to leverage AI, with a keen interest in advancing Productboard Pulse.
• User-Centric and Responsible AI Approach: You consistently prioritize users and understand the importance of building reliable, trustworthy product experiences. This includes a strong commitment to considerate data handling, awareness of ethical considerations for AI features, and ensuring responsible AI practices.
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Job Tags

Full time, Work at office, Work from home,

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