Product Engineer, AI (Laravel)

We have crafted an Applicant Handbook, which we highly recommend you check out, where you can find out more about the company, culture, how we recruit, what we do, and how we do it:

We believe that everyone, no matter their background in work, life, culture or experiences has the ability to be exceptional. We seek exceptional people.

We are bold, like risks, and take on big challenges together. Our customers love the product, provide valuable feedback, and trust us to rapidly help them with more of their problems.

Feel free to join in one of our upcoming Townhalls on Youtube to experience it for yourself: 

We are looking for a Laravel engineer to join our brand new, dedicated AI team to ship needle-moving generative AI experiences to our 14,000+ customers. You can read more about our team breakdowns and get an overview of what each team works on here: 

What you will be working on

You will be an important part of our product and engineering team, focusing on shipping glorious experiences to our hosts.

Together along side  Nik , our AI Principal Engineer, other product engineers and product team, you will be continuing to evolve the product and continue working on our vision to make it trivial to operate a short-term rental with the incredible power of AI.

In terms of AI tech, you can look forward to making heavy use of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI infrastructure APIs, across the full spectrum of AI methods - embeddings and RAG, tool calling and structured output, prompt engineering, intent parsing, guardrails and hallucination detection, and LLM evaluations. Maybe even with a sprinkle of fine-tuning. :)

Although this is a software engineering position, you will have a high degree of ownership and accountability over the product shaping process. This isn’t about dragging Jira tickets or programming what you’re told. And it definitely isn't about creating over-engineered, highly abstracted technical solutions to non-problems.

We are currently a fully-distributed team of 3 product managers, 13 backend engineers, and 3 frontend engineers. We're hiring for this role to help us keep shipping at a high velocity and fill areas in the team that have opened up through growth.

After a few weeks onboarding, you'll dive right into feature development; building, improving and owning the experience that we deliver to hosts and their guests.

To accomplish this, you will:

• Partner with product, sales, customer success, and other engineers to develop and ship features that solve the right problems.
• Not force AI into every part of the product, but build valuable, product-changing AI features that improve our customers' business operations.
• Use your software engineering chops to build magical user experiences, which are both simple for customers to use and simple for other engineers to understand and maintain.
• Add your voice to product shaping discussions.
• Iterate on launched features based on customer feedback.
• Actively seek out opportunities to innovate.
• Integrate multiple third-party services, often in an asynchronous logic flow.
• Creatively solve issues presented by lots of moving parts at scale.
• Work within our “majestic” monolithic codebase and few micro-services, all sitting on a Kubernetes-powered infrastructure-as-code stack.
• Implement and use observability tooling to track and debug post-deployment.
• Seek out and remedy performance issues, high resource usage, and other technical problem areas that have the most impact on business operations and customer experience.

As a team we are all in on Laravel, and we are fortunate to have two Laravel community heavy-weights on our engineering team;  Bobby Bouwmann and  Tom Herrmann .

Our self-defined tech stack acronym is PALM-B; PHP, Angular, Laravel, MySQL and Beanstalk.

Requirements

Hospitable.com is a remote-only and distributed company. For this position, your location is not a requirement. The ideal fit would work under European timezones.

Don’t tick all the boxes? Talk to us about why you’re still an amazing fit. In the meantime, here’s what we’re paying attention to:

• 3+ years software engineering experience, with a focus on backend.
• Significant experience with Laravel, PHP 8.1+, MySQL, and testing pipelines in a deployed web application used by paying customers. We are all in on Laravel; this is non-negotiable.
• A 'shipping' mentality - you get kicks from seeing real customers using your features, receiving feedback from them and iterating/improving on it.
• Exceptional communication skills - especially written. We are a remote-first, fully distributed company. Most communication happens on Slack and Notion.
• An eye for testable, maintainable, and intuitive code, but also...
• Your compass points towards customer and business value, over perfect code (if such a thing exists)
• The ability to think through non-obvious usage scenarios and explore ripple effects within complex systems.
• High degree of empathy both toward customers and teammates.
• Self-motivated and able to make decisions when surrounded by uncertainty. You don’t require a support system to maintain momentum.
• Experience with query optimisation and queue/job-centric backends is a plus.
• Experience with support engineering and communicating with stakeholders who are impacted by your work
• Knowing that Denise's favorite fruit is lychee.

Benefits

The company itself is also a product, one that we iterate on. We're always improving and creating an environment where we all love to work.

• A supportive and caring team environment, where you are trusted, not managed.
• The total budget for this role is within $106,448.40 - $134,450.00 depending on the cost of living in your location. We can hire talent internationally as contractors—or employees if you are based in the United States, the European Union, or Australia, taking into account payroll taxes to determine your gross compensation.
• We also offer an extra incentive into our equity with RSUs (through  our $HOST token ).
• 35 days off per year, encouraged (including self-serve public holidays) and parental leave.
• Mental-health and emotional support with therapists on call through Slack.
• Recognized on Inc.’s list of  Best Workplaces for 2023