Builder

Mashgin • Palo Alto, CA

1d • $185,000 - $275,000

About The Position

This is not a specialized position. We're hiring Builders — people who can wear every hat and ship products that blow people's minds. Most companies split this across five roles: a PM to decide what to build, a designer to figure out how it looks, a frontend engineer, a backend engineer, and someone to handle support when it breaks. We don't do that. At Mashgin, one person owns the whole thing — from talking to a stadium operations manager about their pain points, to sketching a solution, to writing the code that runs on thousands of kiosks, to watching real users interact with it and iterating until it's right. You'll work across our entire stack: the computer vision models running on-device, the kiosk UI that a customer touches, the cloud infrastructure processing a million transactions a day, the dashboards operators use to manage their locations. You'll use AI tools to move at 10x speed, but you'll understand what's happening under the hood. If you could credibly start a company tomorrow and do every job yourself — engineering, design, product, support — you're the kind of person we're looking for. We maintain a flat, high-impact engineering culture where every engineer who joins our team carries the title of Member of Technical Staff.

Reporting & Management Application . Own the application our customers use to understand their business — reporting dashboards, transaction analytics, location management, and operational tools. This requires a deep understanding of data, visualization, and customer processes. You'll need to get inside the heads of stadium operators, c-store managers, and university dining directors to understand what numbers matter to them and how to surface insights that drive real decisions. Not just charts — the whole product experience around the data.

Creator (Menu Management UI) . Own Creator, our menu management platform — the tool operators use to configure what their kiosks recognize, how items are priced, and how menus are organized. This is an incredibly complex workflow (think: thousands of SKUs, regional variations, seasonal rotations, tax rules, modifier chains) that needs to feel simple to a normal human end user. If you love the challenge of taking gnarly domain complexity and making it disappear behind an interface that a non-technical operator can use without training, this is your role.

Requirements

• You're a builder at heart.
• You'd be building software even if nobody paid you.
• You have side projects, open source contributions, or a startup in your past (or future).
• You're deeply technical.
• 5+ years shipping production software.
• Excellent knowledge of one or more of: Python, Node.js , C++, Go, C#, Java.
• Experience building production-ready code that's used regularly by lots of people.
• You think like a product person.
• You don't just ask "how should I build this?" — you ask "should we build this at all?" and "what would make this 10x better for the user?"
• You have taste.
• You care about the details — the animation speed, the error message copy, the API naming convention.
• Craft matters.
• You move fast.
• You bias toward action.
• Ship MVPs, get feedback, iterate.
• You'd rather have something in front of users in a week than a perfect spec in a month.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity.
• We won't hand you a fully-specced PRD.
• You'll figure out what the right thing to build is, often with incomplete information.
• You use AI as a multiplier.
• You're fluent with AI-assisted development tools and understand how to use LLMs to accelerate your workflow — from code generation to prototyping to analysis.
• You can go start a company.
• This is the litmus test.
• If you could credibly do every job at a startup — engineering, design, product, customer support — you're the kind of person we're looking for.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a fast-paced work environment, shipping quality code quickly and iterating
• Comfortable with deploying and managing cloud infrastructure
• Experience with computer vision, deep learning, or ML systems in production
• Experience building software that interfaces with hardware (IoT, embedded, kiosks, robotics)
• Experience in retail, payments, or point-of-sale systems
• Founding engineer or early startup experience

Responsibilities

• Own products, not tickets.
• Take a problem from "we heard this from customers" to "it's live in 4,000 locations."
• You decide what to build, how to build it, and when to ship.
• You'll work directly with the founders on product development from end to end.
• Talk to customers.
• Visit kiosk deployments, sit with operators, watch transactions happen, and understand pain points firsthand — not through a requirements doc.
• Design the experience.
• Sketch UIs, prototype interactions, and make product decisions.
• You don't need to be a trained designer, but you need taste and empathy for the person standing at the kiosk.
• Build simple MVPs and ship them quickly from 0 to 1.
• Dream up new architecture to solve challenging problems.
• Rethink and recreate existing codebases for scale.
• Write great code.
• Full-stack: React/TypeScript for kiosk UIs and dashboards, Python for backend services and ML pipelines, C++ for on-device inference.
• You don't need all of these today, but you need to be comfortable learning new languages, libraries, and frameworks when the solution calls for it.
• Build with AI.
• Use LLMs, copilots, and AI development tools to move at 10x speed.
• Understand how to leverage AI models in production — not just as toys.
• You get an unlimited token budget as long as you keep shipping great work.
• Solve hard problems at the intersection of hardware and software.
• Work with a small interdisciplinary team in hardware, software, and design to build new versions of products from scratch.
• Deal with edge cases that only happen in a stadium during the 7th-inning stretch.
• Make systems that recover gracefully.
• Support what you ship.
• When something breaks at a customer site, you feel it.
• Continuously improve and maintain code that's already in production.

Benefits

• An opportunity to work on a small, multidisciplinary team with the potential to break new ground in many different industries
• Excellent health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents
• 401k plan
• Flexible PTO policy
• Catered lunch in office with fully stocked snacks and beverages
• Pet insurance for your fur babies
• Voluntary life insurance plan
• Competitive salary and options in a small, rapidly scaling company

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed