Waystation AI | Redwood City, CA (in person, 5 days/week) | Full-time
Own whole product areas end to end, on a growing engineering team where something customer-visible ships every week.
ABOUT WAYSTATION
CPG is a $2 trillion market in the U.S., and the manufacturers behind it still run procurement out of email and spreadsheets. Waystation turns supplier email into a structured system of record — every quote, spec, COA, and PO extracted automatically — then gives procurement, QA, and R&D a platform to compare ingredients, track certifications, and draft supplier comms on top of it.
Seed-stage, venture-backed, with paying customers including national bakery, supplement, and better-for-you brands. One customer saved over $200,000 in the first three months. Led by repeat founder Ryan Caldbeck (previously CircleUp); backed by Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, 87 Capital, Floodgate, and SuccessVP.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
- Whole product areas, end to end. Supplier comparison, cert tracking, quote workflows. Backend, interface, and the follow-through after launch — not tickets.
- Impact you can point to. One of six engineers and growing, at a company with real customers and a market measured in trillions. What you ship this month shows up in a renewal conversation next month, and there's no layer between you and that.
- A weekly shipping cadence. Rough and working beats perfect and late. Then you come back and make it right.
- AI as product. Extraction, comparison, drafting, retrieval. Including the unglamorous parts: evals, fallbacks, and what to do when the model is confidently wrong.
- The customer's actual problem. You'll be on customer calls. Requirements don't arrive pre-chewed.
- Quality that holds. When something breaks, you fix the system, not the symptom.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
We'll back the right engineer over the right résumé.
- 5+ years building production software, with real depth across the stack.
- 2+ years at an early-stage startup (seed to Series B) — required. No playbook, no infrastructure handed to you. A purely big-company background isn't a fit.
- You love building product. The one we won't compromise on. You care what it feels like to use and you have opinions about the interface. If you'd rather be handed a spec than help write one, this will frustrate you.
- Fluent in AI, both directions. You build with it — we live in Claude Code — and you ship model-powered features reliable enough to sell.
- You communicate with precision. An engineer, a customer, and the CEO all leave knowing what you decided and why.
- You close things. Messy problems start to finish, and you flag slippage before it slips.
- You're all in. Small team, office five days a week, rocket ship you plant a flag on — not a stepping stone.
Bonus: B2B SaaS in workflow-heavy industries; email, documents, or messy unstructured data; CPG, supply chain, or procurement; search and retrieval; multi-language data (Chinese, Spanish).
NOT THE ROLE FOR YOU IF
- You want a defined lane and a clean backlog.
- You need finished design and product specs before you start.
- You'd choose architectural elegance over what ships this week.
- Five days a week in Redwood City, customer calls, and the occasional plant floor in a hairnet don't appeal.
WHAT WE OFFER
Competitive base salary and meaningful equity. Full health, dental, and vision. Unlimited vacation. Direct work with a repeat founder and CEO, and a front-row seat to how an AI-native company gets built.
VALUES
We are reliable, credible, and authentic. We are solution-oriented. We are proud of our work, our customers, and ourselves.
HOW TO APPLY
Skip the cover letter. Send two things:
1. Something you built that you're proud of. What was true before, what you built, what was true after.
2. A product call you got wrong. What you believed, what happened, what you changed.
Short is fine. We're reading for ownership and judgment, not polish. We move in days, not weeks.