Senior Product Engineer

Sauna•San Francisco, CA

54d•$180,000 - $240,000•Onsite

About The Position

Sauna by Wordware is developing an AI assistant that performs tasks for users by connecting to their existing tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, Linear, and Notion. This AI operates 24/7 in the cloud, providing features such as daily briefings, drafted replies, automated ticket filing, and routine creation. Users interact with Sauna through various platforms including web, iOS, iMessage, Slack, email, and Superhuman. Each user has a personalized Sauna with its own memory, and Saunas within a team can communicate with each other. The target customers are founders and functional leaders in small to medium-sized companies who often spend their time manually integrating different tools. Sauna is built by Wordware, a team of approximately 20 people located in the Presidio, San Francisco.

Requirements

Shipped complex web products and owned them post-launch.
Experience with multiplayer experiences, large-data apps with robust fetching and caching strategies, and streaming or realtime UIs.
Strong product taste and the ability to act on it, from sketching interactions to building and defending tradeoffs.
Deep knowledge of React, including state management, context/store usage, understanding re-renders, and writing reusable components.
Comfortable owning full-stack features end-to-end (migration, route, fetch, UI, analytics).
Care about performance, with the ability to explain caching, invalidation, and optimistic-update choices.
Attention to craft, including loading states, empty states, error copy, and keyboard shortcuts.
Heavy personal use of AI in workflow and opinions on its application.
Autonomous and low ego, willing to ship, get feedback, and iterate.
Focus on owning a few things fully rather than touching many.
US work authorization.

Nice To Haves

Experience building UIs for LLM-based products, considering streaming, uncertainty, progressive disclosure, and non-determinism.
Experience with real-time collaboration technologies (CRDTs, Y.js, Automerge, or homegrown solutions).
Experience with local-first architectures and sync strategies.
Design background or strong visual sense, capable of creating good-looking interfaces without a dedicated designer.
Experience as a founding or early frontend engineer who established technical standards.

Responsibilities

Own the product surface of Sauna, including interfaces for users to delegate tasks, monitor progress, trust results, and engage with the product.
Follow problems across interaction design, client architecture, API routes, database migrations, and analytics implementation.
Take an idea from a rough direction or a Slack thread, sketch the interaction, ship a first version, and iterate based on feedback.
Develop features related to delegation primitives (handing work, progress tracking, interruption, approval, undoing).
Build interfaces for users to view and correct what Sauna has learned, and observe its improvement.
Create surfaces for users to request and manage custom software (backend, data, URL), including monitoring routines and apps.
Develop features for connected Saunas, enabling shared sessions and inter-Sauna communication.
Ensure a consistent user experience across all surfaces (web, mobile, messaging apps).
Implement performance optimizations for a local-first client to ensure instant loading times.
Develop the first-time user experience, including onboarding and billing funnels, focusing on building trust.