Staff Software Engineer, Product/AI

Hi, I'm Paul, VP of Engineering at Customer.io . We're looking for a staff product engineer — not a generalist who happens to touch frontend and backend, but someone who thinks like a product owner and ships like an engineer.

About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive.

We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data. Under the hood: Go, React, and AI help us ship fast and scale with confidence.

What We Value

End-to-end ownership

You take on the problems nobody's claimed — the ones that span squads with no obvious owner — and carry them from a fuzzy first conversation to what's actually live. If it touches the customer, it's yours to chase down.

Comfort in ambiguity

Half-formed problems and conflicting signals are your starting material, not a blocker. You define the problem before you solve it, form a point of view on what's worth building, and move without waiting for someone else to de-risk the call.

Customer-first, always

You think from the customer's problem backward, not the codebase forward. Every technical call traces back to what it does for the person on the other end of the message — and you can explain that connection to people who don't write code. Given the choice, you ship the thing that changes their experience, not the thing that's merely elegant.

A healthy skepticism for "the way things are done"

You retire practices that have outlived their usefulness, including ones you helped build. Best practices matter — but never more than forward motion.

Force multiplication

Shipping your part isn't the bar. You bring in the right people before a problem becomes theirs to clean up, and you leave enough behind — docs, patterns, delegation — that the team keeps moving without you in the room.

What You'll Do

Own important, ambiguous problems from initial framing through launch and iteration. Set direction, align partners, and stay accountable for the result.

Partner with product, design, and data to shape priorities, scope the work, and define how success will be measured.

Lead technical decisions across the stack, including architecture, performance, reliability, and maintainability.

Lead work across teams and systems. Build alignment, resolve technical disagreements, and keep complex initiatives moving.

Improve engineering practices through mentorship, reusable patterns, and clear technical guidance.

Use AI throughout your engineering work, with sound judgment about where it helps, where it falls short, and how its output should be reviewed. Help the team improve by testing new workflows, sharing what works, and identifying useful opportunities for automation.

Participate in an on-call rotation as required, supporting the systems the team builds.

What we're looking for