Founding Product Engineer

Interfere turns a product’s invisible failures into shared problems the whole team can see and fix. Every app has places where users get confused, blocked, or forced to abandon a flow, but most of those moments never make it into a support ticket. We detect those failures in real-time and provide every person responsible for the fix with the context they need. When Interfere flags a broken checkout flow, the PM uses our data to prioritize the issue, the designer sees where the experience broke down, and the engineer pulls the trace underneath. We’re building the operating system for product quality, so teams can move from scattered symptoms to a shared understanding of what’s actually going wrong.

We’re a seven-person team in New York, with $5.1M raised from Y Combinator, Vercel Ventures, Hummingbird, Designer Fund, and others. Interfere is already running in production with design partners, which means the work you ship will immediately help real teams find and fix the failures costing them users today. The category is still being defined, but the product to fill this gap is inevitable, and the company that gets there first will own how the next decade of teams ship software. We're looking for the people who will move at the speed that demands.

The Role

You’ll own end-to-end features, from data model to interface, that define how the best teams understand and fix their products. You'll architect core systems, design the surfaces engineers actually use, and decide what "excellent" means for a category that doesn't exist yet. Concretely, this looks like building:

• Detection and diagnosis systems that reason about codebases and runtime behavior at scale
• Developer-facing interfaces that make complex system failures legible in seconds
• Pipelines that ingest, structure, and correlate billions of product events
• Agentic workflows that triage issues and propose or ship fixes safely
• APIs and integrations that meet developers inside the tools they already use
• The internal standards (for code, design, and judgment) that the next ten engineers will inherit

What we’re looking for

• You've shipped production software that real users depend on
• You move comfortably between frontend behavior, backend systems, and the seams between them
• You can take an ambiguous product or infrastructure problem, define the next useful step, and ship without waiting for a fully specified plan
• You can explain complex system behavior clearly enough that engineers, designers, and PMs can make the right decision quickly
• You are willing to stay with hard problems long enough to understand them deeply, instead of routing around them
• You ship quickly and iterate in production, treating speed as a feature rather than a tradeoff against quality
• You've sat with the people using what you build and let what you saw change the next version

Nice to have

• You are fluent in TypeScript and modern web tooling (Vite, Next.js, React, Node).
• Experience with developer tools, observability, incident response, or session replay
• Built or operated systems handling high-throughput event data
• Shipped agentic or LLM-powered features into production
• Distributed systems depth, or strong eye for product and UI craft (either is a strong asset; both is rare and valuable)

Strong signals

• A product, tool, or system you built that other engineers chose to use
• Open-source work, technical writing, or research with real depth
• Took on more scope than your title suggested at a previous company
• Started something from zero: a company, a team, a product line
• Picked up an unfamiliar domain quickly and shipped something good in it
• A portfolio piece (code, product, writing) where the taste is obvious in the first 30 seconds
• You can point to a piece of UI you built where the detail work is obvious: the empty states, the loading behavior, the keyboard shortcuts nobody asked for but always wanted

How We Work

• We’re in person in New York City. The hardest parts of building Interfere, from system design to architecture tradeoffs to taste calls on the product, happen faster and better at a whiteboard with people physically in the same room. 
• We measure work, not hours. Time at a desk is a poor proxy for whether work is getting done. But there’s a lot to do and genuine urgency to being the category winners. Most people who do well here end up putting in serious hours because the problems are interesting and the upside is real. 
• We ship daily, and we ship deliberately. Speed and taste are not in tension here. Every line of code is a choice: we don't let tech debt accumulate because velocity is easier. We write the code we would want to inherit, while still pushing meaningful changes every day. 
• The roadmap is structure, not scaffolding. We plan out the week, so there’s structure to what you take on. But the items on that roadmap are whole features and subsystems, each one a project in itself. If you see another problem along the way that needs solving, you own that too. It’s your job to make your work into what it needs to be.

Compensation and logistics:

• Health, dental, and vision
• Visa sponsorship for exceptional international candidates
• We'll help you move to New York

Interview process:

1. Intro conversation with the founder
2. Onsite/work trial with the team in New York
3. References and offer 

How to apply

Send us your resume or LinkedIn, plus one piece of evidence we should look at. We want to see how you think and build. A short note on why Interfere helps, but the work matters more.