Product Engineer (Contract)

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Product Engineer (Contract) based in India. This is a hands-on product engineering opportunity for someone who thrives in ambiguous, high-ownership environments. You will take an already functioning AI product from founder-built prototype to a product that real users can adopt, use, and trust independently. The role spans feature completion, UX refinement, testing, security hardening, deployment, user onboarding, and ongoing product iteration. You will work directly with a founder, make practical technical and product decisions, and stay close to early users to understand what needs to improve. The product uses an orchestration layer across leading AI models including Claude, GPT, and Gemini, creating an opportunity to work at the intersection of software engineering and agentic AI. Success will depend less on credentials or years of experience and more on your ability to ship, exercise sound judgment, and turn working software into something people genuinely want to use. Take ownership of the product from its current working state through launch, user adoption, and subsequent iterations. Complete remaining feature development, remove or hide unfinished functionality, and make pragmatic decisions about what is ready to ship. Improve the product's aesthetics, usability, and overall user experience so it feels polished and production-ready rather than like a prototype. Resolve known bugs, expand automated and manual test coverage, and improve overall software quality and reliability. Conduct a security-hardening pass ahead of the first external users and collaborate with external security expertise when required. Deploy the product to alpha users and create an onboarding experience that enables users to reach meaningful value without constant founder or engineering assistance. Communicate directly with early users, respond to support requests, identify recurring friction points, and translate real-world feedback into product improvements. Add appropriate instrumentation and analytics to understand actual user behavior and distinguish observed usage from assumptions or stated preferences. Help turn alpha learnings into the beta roadmap and contribute to decisions around the most appropriate initial customer segment. Build the technical systems, documentation, and development practices needed to enable a future engineering team to take ownership of the product. Work effectively across the existing stack, including vanilla JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Netlify, Node.js tooling, and AI provider APIs. Use agentic coding tools as a core part of the development workflow while independently reviewing, testing, and validating their output. Make thoughtful technical trade-offs, identify potential downstream effects of changes, and maintain a strong understanding of the overall system. Partner directly with the founder on execution while taking ownership of the engineering decisions required to move the product forward. Requirements: Demonstrated experience shipping a real product using an agentic coding harness such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, or an equivalent tool as a primary development environment. The product you built using an agentic coding workflow must have been used by people other than yourself; candidates should be able to explain what they built, what the AI tools got wrong, and how they identified and corrected those issues. Strong software engineering fundamentals, with the ability to read unfamiliar code carefully, understand system-wide dependencies, identify subtle bugs, and anticipate the consequences of technical changes. Demonstrated ability to take a product from development through launch and ongoing support rather than stopping once the core implementation is complete. Strong product instincts and user empathy, with the ability to recognize when technically funct