Member of Technical Staff, Product Engineer

About Sonder

Sonder is an applied AI lab building models that learn how people work.

We bring research, engineering, and design together to build useful personal AI, with privacy and efficiency at the core. We are building our early team in New York.

The Role

We are looking for a product engineer to turn new model capabilities into thoughtfully designed software.

The work is as much a UX problem as a technical one. You will help decide how people interact with AI, prototype unfamiliar ideas, and build the systems that make the experience responsive and reliable.

You will work directly with the founders, designers, and researchers, owning features from early exploration through release. We are looking for someone with strong engineering fundamentals, a feel for interaction design, and the judgment to make good decisions when the requirements are still taking shape.

What You'll Do

- Own features end to end. Move from an open product question to a working prototype, then carry it through implementation, testing, and release.

- Shape the interaction. Work closely with design on flows, feedback, and interface behavior. Use prototypes and direct user feedback to resolve uncertainty.

- Build dependable systems. Develop the application logic, data handling, and interfaces behind each experience. Make sound decisions about state, concurrency, persistence, and failure recovery.

- Keep the experience fast. Profile performance across the stack and resolve the bottlenecks that affect responsiveness and reliability.

- Bring research into the product. Work with researchers to integrate and evaluate new capabilities, and use what you learn from the product to inform further development.

- Care for the finished work. Refine onboarding, accessibility, interaction details, and error states. Stay close to how people use what you ship.

What We're Looking For

- A track record of shipping thoughtfully designed software and taking responsibility for how it works in practice.

- Strong TypeScript skills and experience building both interactive interfaces and the application logic behind them.

- Sound fundamentals in asynchronous programming, data modeling, persistence, and debugging complex applications.

- Product judgment: you can reason from a person's needs to an interaction, prototype quickly, and improve your approach after trying it.

- Attention to visual and interaction details, supported by the engineering discipline to make the experience dependable.

- Comfort collaborating with researchers and designers on open-ended problems.

Particularly Exciting

Experience building consumer products, desktop applications, or software powered by language and multimodal models. Systems programming experience in Rust or a similar language is also valuable.

We would like to see something you shipped, the decisions you owned, and what you learned from people using it.

Logistics

- Location: This role is based in New York. We work together in person and are building the early team here.

- Visa Sponsorship: We sponsor visas. We cannot guarantee success in every case, but if you are the right fit, we are committed to working through the process with you.

Compensation & Benefits

- Compensation: Depending on background, skills, and experience, the expected annual salary range for this position is $180,000–$250,000 USD, plus meaningful equity.

- Benefits: Sonder offers comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage, flexible PTO, and relocation support as needed.