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.

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.

NICE TO HAVES:

• Deep expertise in our primary tech stack (Ruby, Kotlin, Python, Postgres, DuckDB, AWS).
• Specific experience architecting and leading backend development for LLM-powered features across multiple teams, ideally for AI-driven insight or feedback analysis tools.
• Direct experience contributing to the success of an AI-powered B2B SaaS feature similar to Productboard Pulse.
• Experience developing internal platforms, SDKs, or shared services for AI/LLM integration.
• Familiarity with frameworks like LangChain.
• Diverse Interests: We appreciate candidates who have passions beyond technology, whether it’s in the arts, history, social sciences, or any other field.
  We’re looking for skilled and enthusiastic individuals from diverse backgrounds to join our team. Don’t worry if your experience doesn’t match all the criteria in the job description. If you love building and are committed to making quality products while sharing our company values, we’d like to hear from you.
  Why Productboard? Join a company that is a recognized leader in product management. You’ll have the opportunity to work on challenging and meaningful problems, contributing to a product used by thousands of teams worldwide, and play a critical role in the success of our flagship AI initiative, Productboard Pulse.

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.