Founding Revenue Systems Engineer

Own a profitable engine at a scale most builders never touch - and build the billing spine that turns a free API into paid revenue.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping - what is actually true about a product, including when not to buy. SimplyCodes is its first proof at scale: the code verification service that shows shoppers codes that actually work, around $22M a year in revenue at roughly 60% margins. Product.ai is 100% founder-owned, profitable, and running since 2009, with no outside investors and no board. A small team of fewer than twenty operators outbuilds companies 10x our size.

Why This Role Exists

Two things are true inside this company at once. There is a profitable revenue engine - hundreds of thousands of stores, millions of shoppers, real money moving every day - that funds everything else we build. And there is a second engine that barely exists yet: a paid developer API, where AI agents and outside developers pay for verified-commerce data by the key.

The first engine is SimplyCodes, the code verification service. A few engineers and the founder keep it running, each stretched thin, and it has far more upside than its owners have hours. The second engine is the billing spine that turns that free API into paid revenue - keyed access, metering, developer tiers, spend caps - and today it has no owner.

This seat owns both. You steward the money that already flows and you build the money that is about to. You decide what to build, and you are measured in dollars.

The System You'll Need to Model

• The commission engine. Money flows through the code here. Dozens of affiliate networks report what we earned, each on its own schema, lag, and reversal rules, and a bug in that path does not crash anything - it quietly leaks five figures before anyone notices.
• Metering, quota, and billing as product. A free API becomes paid revenue only when every call is counted, capped, and invoiced correctly. Developer keys at $49 to $199 a month, spend caps, per-platform origin stamps - the meter is the product, and an error in the meter is an error on the invoice.
• The agent-commerce lane. The next shift is AI agents, not people, choosing which commerce data to call - the way Google once chose which pages to index. Machines are the new customers and keys are the new accounts, and the billing spine has to treat a robot as a first-class paying buyer.
• Attribution truth. Every dollar traces back to one fragile click ID that has to survive an async gap of hours to months, across dozens of networks that each name and format it differently. Get this wrong and you do not slow a page - you misstate the revenue.
• The matched pair with the commercial seat. One operator closes the deals - the developer tiers, the merchant programs, the platform partnerships - and you build what makes those promises real. When they sign a developer to a paid tier, your billing spine is the thing that has to deliver.
• Cortex, the brain that runs the company. You work inside Cortex, our shared AI brain - the same system we sell as a product family. Every operator works through governed AI sessions, and the substrate answers its own questions from more than 8,600 internal documents. Nobody else runs a company this way.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The billing spine, end to end. Keyed developer access, metering, quota, spend caps, and per-platform origin stamps - the machinery that turns a free API into paid revenue. You architect it, ship it, and own the invoice that proves it is right.
• The commission engine. The affiliate ingestion, attribution, and reconciliation that carry the existing revenue line of around $22M a year. A few engineers and the founder keep it running today, each stretched thin; you take it and push it further than anyone has had the hours to.
• Two public cutovers. Anonymous API access ends August 15. Legacy free codes expire September 30. The keying and metering have to be live before the free lane closes, and both cutovers are yours to land.
• Your seat charter. This is the model we run, not a claim that every operator already has one: inside your first quarter you co-sign a charter with one machine-checkable number that proves the seat is working, plus a written split of what you decide on your own and what you bring to the founder first.
• The verdict on what ships. Agents write most of the code. The scarce thing is judgment - reading a system well enough to say why the code is right - and that verdict is yours, measured in dollars moved, not features shipped.

Who You Are

You reason in invariants, failure modes, and tradeoffs, and you tie each one to the dollar it moves. You can read a system you have never seen well enough to sketch where it leaks money the same day. When a number looks wrong, you instrument the pipeline and find the mechanism rather than reaching for a different model and hoping.

Agents are your production system. You direct them and you verify what comes back - you can do this job by hand and prove it, and that mastery is exactly what lets you trust or reject what an agent hands you. You treat its output as something you check, never something you accept on faith. The expensive thing here is a redo cycle, never the compute.

You have owned a system where the outcome was real money - payments, billing, metering, an affiliate or commission ledger, attribution, fraud-scoring, or a search or marketplace system at scale. You can point at it and explain the mechanism that moved the number, not just show the chart. Where you did it and what you studied matter far less than that you built the money path and watched it hold under load. That is the transfer we want.

Who this isn't for. This seat is wrong if you stay in one lane and call the rest someone else's department. It is wrong if you measure yourself by features shipped instead of the revenue those features move, or if you want a commission ladder to climb rather than a number to own. It is wrong if you need a brand-name logo on your resume or a platform team beneath you to feel senior. And it is wrong if you are comfortable shipping what an agent produced without being able to say why it is right. You will be happiest here if you want to own the whole money path yourself and be measured on what it produces.

How We Evaluate

We don't run traditional engineering interviews. We evaluate demonstrated performance on work-relevant tasks, in five steps.

Async video screen. Short and on your own time - five to six questions, about fifteen minutes. We want to see how you think, not how you present.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the people you would build beside.

Conversation with the founder. How you model a system, where you push back, and whether you can defend a technical judgment in a live argument.

Paid work trial. A paid four-day trial on real work in our real environment - a live piece of the money path, taken from grounding to a change you can prove moved a number. We watch four things: how you get grounded, whether you instrument before you guess, how you verify what your agents produce, and whether your self-assessment is honest.

If the work above reads like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the artifact and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year compensation: $400,000 - $480,000 (base plus equity plus profit sharing). Base: $250,000 - $330,000 - top of market for the work.

Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B membership interests at a $0 strike, real ownership day one, capital-gains treatment; annual pro-rata profit sharing from free cash flow; annual tender liquidity; 100% family premium coverage; an AI tooling budget steered by return, never capped.

This structure is built to mint partners. When the company wins, you win - in real, liquid dollars, every year.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles - in person, five days a week. The rooms are real rooms.