Staff Product Engineer

Artifact AI is building the first truly agentic accounting platform—end-to-end, zero manual work. We are hiring extreme performers only (top 1% in something hard). Our team is small, with high ownership and no comfort mode.

Why this role exists:

Artifact AI is rebuilding accounting from the ground up. Not making the software incrementally better, but rebuilding the work itself, so one accountant does what a team used to do and a set of books closes itself in the background while a human stays in the loop. Two products do the heavy lifting: Arti handles ingestion, matching, reconciliation, and journal posting, while Omni orchestrates 600+ platforms and lets accountants build agentic workflows using natural language. We are backed by a16z, based in London and NYC, and accounting firms run their clients' month-end on us today. Growth is about to bend sharply.

The role:

• You will own real surface area, from the database schemas to a front-end component someone clicks on a Tuesday.
• Backend is home (Python, async, the messy distributed parts), but you'll move into the AI layer, the front-end, or the infra when the problem is there.
• You set direction on what you own, build the code that matters, and push back when you think we're wrong.
• You raise the bar of people around you and have done it before.
• Pace matters here; speed and quality pull against each other. The skill is knowing what to spend the day on and what to ship rough and fix Friday.
• You use AI to the max or anything else that makes you 10x, and you know when to put the tools down and get your hands dirty.
• Low ego, high standards. You are kind to the humans on the team and brutal on the work.
• You know the domain, with a background in fintech, accounting, audit, ERP, or financial close.

Bonus:

• You have been a founder or founding engineer of a venture-backed company.
• You have built developer-facing products, APIs, or SDKs.
• You have shipped agent systems with structured tool-use at scale.
• You have meaningful Go, Rust, or TypeScript backend experience to complement your Python.
• You have hired, ramped, or mentored other engineers not as a manager, but as the senior IC people gravitated toward.

What you will not do here:

• You will not have a process between you and the work. No JIRA tickets handed down, no PMs gating your access to customers, no architecture review board you have to convince before writing code.
• You will not manage people in this role. This is a senior IC track.
• You will not work 9-to-5. We expect you are the kind of person who finds that energising rather than alarming.

Working at Artifact:

Artifact's culture is intense and not for everyone. We work hard, we ship fast, and we are direct with each other when something is off. We hire grown-ups and we expect grown-up behaviour. We celebrate wins together, and we do not pretend everything is fine when it isn't.

We are a fit for you if:

• You are unreasonable about quality.
• You are happiest when you are shipping.
• You would rather argue about a design doc than sit through a status meeting.
• You have a real, weird, founder-shaped reason to want to spend the next several years rebuilding accounting.

We are not a fit for you if:

• You want predictable career progression frameworks, heavy processes, formal mentorship structures, or strong work-life-balance signals.

How we hire:

• Intro call (30 min) - Mutual fit, what you have built, what you are looking for.
• Technical deep-dive (90 min) - Design System + Pair Programming session.
• Take-home + review (5–8 hours of your time, scheduled how you like) - A scoped problem from our actual codebase.
• Culture round (30 min) - Direct conversation about why us, why now, what you and we would not tolerate.
• Reverse interview where you ask anyone on the team anything.
• Offer where there is mutual fit.

We move fast. The whole loop is typically two weeks. If we are slow on you, it is because we are deliberating, and we will tell you what is happening. We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on the basis of evidence that you can do the work and want to do it here, full stop.