Staff Product Engineer (Porto Alegre)

Staff Product Engineer (Remote, Porto Alegre, Brazil)

LawnStarter is the leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and outdoor services, processing over $100 million in annual bookings. We are expanding to become the go-to platform for all home services, operating across three brands on a unified platform.

This is a remote role for candidates located in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

About Engineering at LawnStarter

Our engineering structure is built around initiative teams. Each team consists of a Product Engineer, a Product Manager, and a Designer, supported by an Engineering Manager who oversees a few initiatives and focuses on your professional growth. As the engineer on an initiative, you will lead AI agents, manage the entire development lifecycle, and be accountable for the initiative's success metrics alongside your PM and designer. We believe that a small number of strong engineers leveraging AI agents can significantly outperform traditional team models. This approach requires engineers who are driven by ownership and capable of shipping to a live marketplace with active customers and service providers.

The Role

You will serve as the engineering lead for one initiative at a time. This is a collaborative effort within an "iron triangle" comprising you, your Product Manager, and your Designer. Your involvement spans the full lifecycle: shaping the problem, defining the technical approach, guiding AI agents in code implementation, deploying to production, and owning the outcome.

Your accountability is for the initiative's results, not just the volume of code produced. If an AI agent can safely implement a solution, your role is to ensure it's done correctly and that the key metric improves. You will write critical code yourself when necessary.

What Makes This Role Unique:

• Lead AI Agents, Not Humans: Your team includes AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and our internal agent stack. You are responsible for the quality, safety, and speed of their output.
• Own Outcomes, Not Ticket Queues: You are responsible from problem definition through production deployment and post-launch metric review.
• Horizontal Partnership: You will collaborate directly with Product Management and Design without traditional layers of technical leadership or approval committees.
• Staff-Level Expectations: This role requires a high degree of autonomy and decision-making. If you prefer to wait for direction, this may not be the right fit.

What You'll Own

• Technical Approach: Define the architecture, data models, integration strategies, rollout plans, observability, and rollback procedures for your initiative.
• Agent-Led Implementation Quality: Ensure the quality, safety, and correctness of AI-authored code through effective prompts, guardrails, evaluations, tests, and review processes.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Engage daily with your PM on scope and tradeoffs, and with your Designer on UX decisions. Collaborate weekly with your Engineering Manager on initiative health and growth.
• Initiative Outcome: Drive the specific metric your initiative is designed to impact. Partner with your PM to present results and analysis post-launch.
• High Shipping Bar: Maintain production correctness, security, performance, and observability for all shipped work, ensuring AI agents accelerate rather than lower standards.

Problems to Solve

• Leading AI Agents at Staff-Level Quality: Develop workflows that enable AI agents to produce code meeting senior engineering standards, focusing on prompts, evaluations, testing, and observability.
• Owning Outcomes Without a Tech Lead: Make timely, well-documented decisions and remain accountable for results in a less hierarchical structure.
• Shipping Outcomes, Not Features: Focus on driving key metrics, making strategic scope decisions, and following up on post-launch performance.

Who You Are

• AI-Native: Proficient in using AI coding assistants daily for production work, with strong opinions on prompt engineering, evaluation strategies, and agent workflows.
• Operating at Lead Level: Demonstrated ability to make critical decisions, ship complex features, and take ownership of outcomes, regardless of current title.
• Outcome-Driven: Focused on measurable impact and customer experience improvements, comfortable being measured by key metrics.
• Strong Horizontal Partner: Able to collaborate effectively with PM and Design, bringing engineering judgment to product decisions and vice-versa.
• Decisive and Documented: Capable of making and documenting architectural decisions efficiently.
• Impact Multiplier: Creates reusable artifacts (workflows, runbooks, reviews) that benefit other engineers.
• Customer-Centric: Prioritizes business and customer outcomes alongside technical excellence.

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.
• Data: Redshift, dbt, Segment, Airflow.