Staff Software Engineer, Product

About LawnStarter

LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and outdoor services, boasting over $150M in annual bookings. We are expanding beyond lawn care to become the premier one-stop shop for all home services, operating across three distinct brands: LawnStarter, Lawn Love, and Home Gnome, all powered by a single shared platform.

About Engineering at LawnStarter

Our engineering teams are structured into small, focused initiative units. A Product Engineer collaborates closely with a Product Manager (PM) and a designer, with support from an Engineering Manager dedicated to fostering professional growth. Engineers also work alongside peers across various initiatives within a shared codebase. Team ownership is central, with collective accountability for achieving key metrics.

AI coding agents serve as a significant force multiplier, empowering our small, senior team to deliver more features, faster, and with exceptional quality. We seek engineers who demonstrate strong ownership and are driven by the impact of shipping solutions to a dynamic marketplace serving both customers and service professionals.

The Role

As the engineering anchor for an initiative, you will be an integral part of a cohesive team, collaborating with your Product Manager and designer, as well as engineering peers on related initiatives. Your involvement spans the entire product lifecycle, from defining problems and determining technical approaches to guiding AI agents in code implementation, deploying to production, and collectively owning the project's outcome.

Success in this role is measured by impact, not merely by lines of code. When an AI agent can safely deliver code, your responsibility is to ensure its correctness and that it contributes to moving the relevant metric. For sensitive areas, you will implement robust guardrails, including comprehensive tests, evaluations, staged rollouts, and rigorous review gates, to verify that changes function precisely as intended without unintended side effects.

What Makes This Role Exciting:

• End-to-End Ownership: You will manage the entire product lifecycle, from initial problem framing and production deployment to post-launch metric review, owning the results alongside your team.
• True Product Partnership: Collaborate directly with Product Managers and designers, contributing engineering expertise to product decisions and product insight to engineering discussions.
• Significant Autonomy: Exercise substantial technical autonomy, making most technical decisions independently, with architectural review for major architectural choices and rapid peer feedback.
• Staff-Level Impact: Operate at a senior staff level, entrusted with critical decision-making, delivering complex solutions, and taking full accountability for outcomes.

What You'll Own:

• Technical Approach: Define the architecture, data model, integration choices, rollout plan, observability strategy, and rollback plan for your initiative. You will make most technical decisions, escalating significant architectural choices for architect review, documenting them, and iterating based on data.
• Implementation Quality: Ensure the quality of agent-authored code through effective prompts, guardrails, evaluations, tests, and review processes, guaranteeing safe, correct, and production-ready solutions. You are accountable for all code, maintaining the same high standards as the rest of the team.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Engage in daily collaboration with your Product Manager on scope and tradeoffs, and with your designer on UX decisions and in-tool prototyping. You will also regularly collaborate with engineering peers and conduct weekly check-ins with your Engineering Manager.
• Initiative Outcome: Drive the specific metric your initiative aims to improve. Alongside your Product Manager, you will present post-launch results (2–4 weeks out) and confirm the initiative's success.
• High Shipping Standards: Uphold rigorous standards for production correctness, security, performance, observability, and the overall experience for both customers and service professionals. AI agents enhance your efficiency without compromising quality.

Problems to Solve:

• Leading AI Agents to Staff-Level Quality: A significant portion of your initiative's code will be generated by AI agents. Your expertise will be crucial in ensuring this code meets senior engineer standards through precise prompts, pre-merge evaluations, comprehensive edge-case testing, and proactive observability to detect regressions before they impact customers. Develop workflows that enable a small team to achieve disproportionately high output.
• Autonomous Decision Ownership: Exercise substantial freedom to make and document technical decisions rapidly, with architectural review for major decisions and peer input to refine your approach. Strategize how to maintain rapid progress, team alignment, and accountability for project outcomes.
• Shipping Outcomes, Not Just Features: Each initiative is tied to a specific metric, such as conversion rates, retention curves, professional funnel KPIs, or unit-economics improvements. You will be accountable for these metrics alongside your team. Determine how to effectively scope projects to impact these metrics, prioritize what not to build, and ensure diligent follow-up 2–4 weeks after launch.

What Success Looks Like (Year 1):

• Achieved Initiative Outcomes: Successfully ship 3–4 initiatives end-to-end, with at least two demonstrably moving their target metrics, validated by post-launch reviews.
• Reusable Agent Workflows: Develop prompts, evaluations, and review loops for AI agents that are adopted and utilized by peers across other initiatives.
• Accelerated Cycle Time: Significantly reduce the median time from problem framing to the initial production rollout for your initiatives.
• Maintained Quality: Ensure no customer- or professional-facing regressions occur due to agent-authored code that bypassed your review process.
• Demonstrated Leverage: Create valuable artifacts such as runbooks, evaluations, agent workflows, and post-launch write-ups that serve as essential references for your peers.

Requirements

Who You Are:

• AI-Native: Proficient in using AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex daily for production work. You possess strong opinions on prompts, evaluations, agent loops, and review workflows, having established processes where AI agents generate code under your guidance, review, and verification.
• Lead-Level Operator: Regardless of your current title, you have a proven track record of making critical decisions, delivering challenging projects, and taking accountability for their success.
• Outcome-Driven: Your focus is on measurable impact, evaluating success by metric movement and improved user experience. You actively analyze post-launch dashboards and own the results.
• Strong Cross-Functional Partner: You effectively collaborate with Product Managers and designers, contributing engineering expertise to product discussions and product insights to engineering decisions, while also working seamlessly with engineering peers in a shared codebase.
• Decisive and Documented: You are adept at making and documenting architectural, data model, and rollout decisions efficiently, incorporating rapid feedback to drive progress.
• Force Multiplier: Your contributions extend beyond individual initiatives, creating reusable artifacts such as agent workflows, evaluations, runbooks, and post-launch reviews that amplify the team's overall impact.
• Customer and Professional-Minded: You are deeply committed to delivering positive outcomes for both customers and service professionals within a dynamic marketplace environment.

Good to Know:

• Individual Contributor Role with Growth Potential: This is an individual contributor position, with people management responsibilities handled by the Engineering Manager. However, a clear path to management is available for those interested.
• End-to-End Product Engineering: You will be responsible for shipping features that directly impact key metrics. Platform and architectural work are integrated within initiatives as needed to achieve desired outcomes.
• Hands-On with High Quality Standards: While AI agents manage much of the implementation, your role involves applying critical judgment, design principles, ensuring safety, and maintaining accountability. The quality bar is exceptionally high.
• Live Marketplace Impact: You will be shipping solutions to a live marketplace with over $150M in bookings, meaning customers and service professionals will utilize your work within the same week of deployment.

Tech You'll Touch:

• AI Agents: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, internal agent stack, MCP servers, evals tooling
• Backend: PHP/Laravel
• Frontend: TypeScript/React/React Native (for customer and professional applications, both web and mobile)
• Data: Redshift, dbt, Segment, Airflow
• Infrastructure: AWS, Datadog, Sentry, GitHub Actions
• Documentation & Process: Brain (Claude Code skills + docs repo), Confluence, Jira

While not every technology listed needs to be mastered, candidates should possess deep expertise in at least one of our core stacks, coupled with credible production experience utilizing AI coding agents.

Benefits

• Competitive annual base salary of USD $85,000–$125,000
• Work from anywhere
• High degree of ownership and autonomy
• Engage with a fast-moving team dedicated to building, learning, and professional growth