Senior Product Engineer

Sauna•San Francisco, CA

53d•$180,000 - $240,000•Onsite

About The Position

Sauna by Wordware is an AI assistant that performs tasks for users, going beyond simple question answering. It integrates with existing tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, Linear, and Notion, operating 24/7 in the cloud. Its functionalities include generating daily briefings from emails and calendars, drafting replies in the user's voice, filing tickets from Slack threads, and automating repetitive tasks into routines or small applications. Users interact with Sauna through various platforms including a web and iOS app, iMessage, Slack, email, and Superhuman. Each user has a personalized Sauna with its own memory, and Saunas within the same team can communicate to share project knowledge without direct user interruption. Sauna's target customers are founders and functional leaders in companies of 1-100 employees who currently spend significant time manually integrating different tools. Sauna is developed by Wordware, a team of approximately 20 people located in the Presidio, San Francisco.

Requirements

Shipped complex web products and owned them after launch.
Experience with multiplayer experiences, large-data apps with real fetching and caching strategy, streaming or realtime UIs.
Product taste and the ability to act on it: sketch interactions, build them, and defend tradeoffs.
Deep knowledge of React, including state management, context/store usage, re-render optimization, and writing reusable components.
Comfortable owning a full-stack feature end to end (migration, route, fetch, UI, analytics).
Care about performance and can explain caching, invalidation, and optimistic-update choices.
Care about craft: loading states, empty states, error copy, keyboard shortcuts.
Heavy user of AI in personal workflow and opinions on its application.
Autonomous and low ego; ship, get feedback, iterate.
Prefer to own five things fully rather than touch fifty.
US work authorization required; open to O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.
Must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.

Nice To Haves

Built UIs for LLM-based products (streaming, uncertainty, progressive disclosure, non-determinism).
Experience with real-time collaboration (CRDTs, Y.js, Automerge, or homegrown equivalent).
Experience with local-first architectures and sync strategies.
Design background or strong visual sense.
Experience as a founding or early frontend engineer who set standards from scratch.

Responsibilities

Own the product surface of Sauna, including interfaces for delegating work, monitoring progress, and building trust.
Follow problems across interaction design, client architecture, API routes, database migrations, and analytics.
Take an idea from a rough direction or Slack thread to a shipped first version, iterating based on feedback.
Develop features related to delegation primitives (handing work, following progress, interrupting, approving, undoing).
Build surfaces for users to see and correct Sauna's learned information (memory).
Create interfaces for routines and apps, allowing users to request custom software, install it, and monitor it.
Develop features for connected Saunas, enabling shared sessions and inter-Sauna communication.
Ensure a consistent user experience across all surfaces (web, iOS, iMessage, Slack, email, Superhuman), including onboarding.
Focus on performance as a feature, potentially using a local-first client architecture.
Develop the first-time user experience and billing funnel, from landing page to trial to paying team.
Own a full-stack feature end to end, including migration, route, fetch, UI, and analytics.
Present work at Friday week reviews during the paid work trial.