Staff Software Engineer, Product

About LawnStarter

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

About Engineering at LawnStarter

Our engineering teams are structured into small, focused initiative groups. Each group features a Product Engineer collaborating closely with a Product Manager (PM) and a designer, supported by an Engineering Manager dedicated to fostering growth. You will also work alongside engineering peers on various initiatives within a shared codebase. The entire team shares ownership of achieving key metrics.

We leverage AI coding agents as a force multiplier, enabling our small, senior team to deliver more, faster, and with exceptional quality. We seek engineers who are driven by ownership and energized by deploying solutions to a real-world marketplace serving both customers and service professionals.

The Role

As an engineering anchor for an initiative, you will be an integral part of a cohesive team, working with your PM and designer, and collaborating with engineering peers on related projects. Your involvement spans the full development lifecycle: from problem definition and technical approach selection to directing AI agents for code implementation, shipping to production, and ultimately, owning the outcome with your team.

Your performance is measured by impact, not by lines of code. When an AI agent can safely deliver a solution, your role is to ensure its correctness and that it moves the target metric. For sensitive areas requiring meticulous attention, you will personally write the code.

What makes this role exciting:

• End-to-End Ownership: You will manage the entire project lifecycle, from problem framing and production deployment to post-launch metric review, owning the results with your team.
• True Product Partnership: Collaborate directly with PMs and designers, contributing engineering judgment to product decisions and product sense to technical discussions.
• High Autonomy: You will make most technical decisions independently, with architectural reviews for significant choices and rapid input from peers.
• Staff-Level Operation: You are trusted to make critical decisions, deliver complex solutions, and stand behind the outcomes.

What You'll Own

• Technical Approach: Define the architecture, data model, integration choices, rollout plan, observability, and rollback strategy for your initiative. You will make most decisions, bringing significant architectural choices for review, documenting them, and iterating based on data.
• Implementation Quality: Ensure the effectiveness of prompts, guardrails, evaluations, tests, and the review loop that enables AI agents to ship safe, correct, and production-ready code. While most code will be agent-authored, you are accountable for its quality, held to the same high standards as the rest of the team in a shared codebase.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Engage daily with your PM on scope and tradeoffs, with designers on UX decisions and prototyping, collaborate regularly with engineering peers, and conduct weekly check-ins with your Engineering Manager.
• Initiative Outcome: Drive the specific metric the initiative aims to improve. With your PM, you will present results 2–4 weeks post-launch and confirm the success of the initiative.
• High Quality Bar: Maintain rigorous standards for production correctness, security, performance, observability, and the overall user experience for customers and professionals. AI agents enhance speed, but never compromise quality.

Problems to Solve

• Leading AI Agents at a Staff-Level Quality Bar: Most code will be AI-authored. Your expertise will ensure it ships as if written by a senior engineer, through effective prompts, evaluations, comprehensive tests, and robust observability to prevent regressions. Develop workflows that enable a small team to achieve disproportionately high output.
• Owning Decisions with High Autonomy: Exercise significant latitude to make and document technical decisions swiftly, with architect review for major architectural choices and peer feedback. Balance speed, team alignment, and accountability for outcomes.
• Shipping Outcomes, Not Features: Each initiative is measured by a specific metric (e.g., conversion rate, retention, KPI). You are accountable for this metric alongside your team. Strategically scope projects, decide what not to build, and diligently follow up 2–4 weeks post-launch to confirm impact.

What Success Looks Like (Year 1)

• Initiative Outcomes Achieved: Successfully ship 3–4 end-to-end initiatives, with at least two demonstrably moving their target metrics, validated by post-launch reviews.
• Scalable Agent Workflow: Develop prompts, evaluations, and review loops that are adopted and utilized by peers across other initiatives.
• Faster Cycle Time: Significantly reduce the median time from problem framing to initial production rollout for your initiatives.
• Quality Maintained: Prevent any customer- or pro-facing regressions attributable to agent-authored code that bypasses your review.
• Visible Leverage: Create reusable artifacts—such as runbooks, evaluations, agent workflows, and post-launch write-ups—that serve as valuable references for peers.

Who You Are

• AI-Native: You regularly use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar for daily production work. You possess strong opinions on prompts, evaluations, agent loops, and review workflows, and you instinctively know when to leverage agents versus writing code manually.
• Operating at a Lead Level: Regardless of your current title, you have a track record of making critical decisions, delivering challenging projects, and taking accountability for their success.
• Outcome-Driven: Your focus is on measurable impact, such as metric movement and improved user experience. You actively analyze post-launch dashboards and own the results.
• Strong Horizontal Partner: You effectively collaborate with PMs and designers, and work seamlessly with engineering peers in a shared codebase. You bring both engineering judgment to product discussions and product judgment to technical decisions.
• Decisive and Documented: You make architectural, data-model, and rollout decisions, document them, seek rapid input, and execute efficiently.
• A Force Multiplier: Your influence extends beyond your immediate initiatives through the creation of reusable artifacts like agent workflows, evaluations, runbooks, and post-launch reviews.
• Customer- and Pro-Minded: You are deeply committed to delivering positive outcomes for both customers and service professionals within our marketplace.

Good to Know

• Individual Contributor Role with Growth Potential: This is an individual contributor position, with management responsibilities handled by the Engineering Manager. However, a path to management is available for those interested.
• End-to-End Product Engineering: You will ship features that directly impact metrics. Platform and architectural work are integrated into initiatives as needed to achieve outcomes.
• Hands-On with High Quality Bar: While AI agents handle much of the implementation, you provide the critical judgment, design oversight, safety assurance, and accountability. The quality bar remains exceptionally high.
• Shipping to a Live Marketplace: With over $150M in bookings, your work will be used by real customers and professionals 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 (customer & pro apps, web and mobile)
• Data: Redshift, dbt, Segment, Airflow
• Infra: AWS, Datadog, Sentry, GitHub Actions
• Documentation & Process: Brain (Claude Code skills + docs repo), Confluence, Jira

You don't need to check every box, but you should possess deep expertise in at least one of our core stacks and credible production experience with AI coding agents.

Benefits

• Competitive annual base salary of USD $85,000–$125,000.
• Work from anywhere.
• High degree of ownership and autonomy.
• Join a fast-moving team passionate about building, learning, and growing.