Staff Product Engineer (Belo Horizonte)

Staff Product Engineer (Remote, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

LawnStarter is the leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and outdoor services, with over $100 million in annual bookings. We are expanding to become the go-to platform for all home services across our brands: LawnStarter, Lawn Love, and Home Gnome, all powered by a single, shared platform.

We are restructuring our engineering team around initiative-based 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 engineer growth. In this model, the engineer leads AI agents, drives development, and shares accountability for the initiative's success metrics with the rest of the team. We believe that a small number of highly skilled engineers leveraging AI agents can outperform traditional team structures. This approach requires engineers who are driven by ownership and can deliver for a marketplace with active customers and service providers.

About the Role

As a Staff Product Engineer, you will be the engineering anchor for one initiative at a time. You will collaborate closely with your Product Manager and Designer, forming an "iron triangle" that guides the initiative through its entire lifecycle. This includes shaping the problem, defining the technical approach, leading AI agents for code implementation, deploying to production, and being accountable for the outcomes.

Your primary responsibility is the initiative's success, not the volume of code produced. If an AI agent can safely implement a solution, your role is to ensure it does so correctly and that the key metrics improve. You will write critical code yourself when necessary.

What Makes This Role Unique

• Lead AI Agents, Not Humans: Your team includes AI coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex, alongside our internal agent stack. You are responsible for the quality, safety, and speed of their output.
• Own Outcomes, Not Ticket Queues: You will own the entire process from problem definition through production deployment and post-launch metric analysis.
• Horizontal Partnership: You will work directly with Product and Design without traditional hierarchies like tech leads or architect approval committees.
• Staff-Level Expectations: This role requires a high degree of autonomy and decision-making. You are expected to lead and make critical calls independently.

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 and safety of AI-generated code through effective prompts, guardrails, evaluations, tests, and review processes.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate daily with your PM on scope and trade-offs, with your Designer on UX and prototyping, and weekly with your EM on initiative health and growth.
• Initiative Outcome: Drive the specific metric your initiative is designed to impact, partnering with your PM to present results and learnings post-launch.
• High Shipping Bar: Maintain rigorous standards for production correctness, security, performance, and observability, ensuring AI agents accelerate rather than lower quality.

Problems to Solve

• Leading AI Agents at Staff-Level Quality: Develop workflows that enable AI agents to produce production-ready code equivalent to that of a senior engineer, 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 moving key business metrics, making strategic scope decisions, and rigorously following up on post-launch performance.

What Success Looks Like (Year 1)

• Successfully ship 3-4 initiatives end-to-end, with at least two demonstrably moving their target metrics.
• Develop and share AI agent workflows that are adopted by other engineers.
• Significantly reduce the cycle time from problem definition to production rollout.
• Maintain a high standard for agent-authored code, preventing customer- or pro-facing regressions.
• Create reusable artifacts (runbooks, evaluations, write-ups) that benefit other engineers.

Who You Are

• AI-Native: Proficient and opinionated about using AI coding assistants for production work.
• Operating at Lead Level: You have a track record of making key decisions, shipping complex projects, and taking ownership of outcomes.
• Outcome-Driven: Focused on business impact and customer experience, measured by metrics rather than lines of code.
• Strong Horizontal Partner: Able to collaborate effectively with Product Managers and Designers, bringing engineering judgment to product decisions.
• Decisive and Documented: Capable of making and documenting technical decisions efficiently.
• Impact Multiplier: You create reusable assets and processes that benefit the wider engineering team.
• **Customer-Centric