Product Engineer

Robby (YC W26) builds the AI sales and growth engine for home services, starting with HVAC. The three founders left Harvard Business School, rode along with dozens of technicians, and are studying for the EPA 608 exam so they can become certified techs themselves. Traction is real: nine named customer logos, paying customers each uncovering six figures in new revenue every week, and $40,000 in new business closed within the first hour of launch.

US home services, HVAC, plumbing, and pool, is a $600 billion market of hundreds of thousands of small operators running on software technicians struggle to use. Robby turns each technician visit into structured data and revenue. It helps techs decide what equipment to recommend, present clean options to a homeowner, and get clear talking points in the field. Simple voice AI captures what happened on the job, and it rolls into one view for general managers. The hard part is a technical product that feels effortless to people who are not technical. Robby is live with HVAC operators across the US and expanding into other home services. Seed stage, about 1 to 10 people, founded in 2026, in New York.

Robby is hiring a product engineer. This is a customer-facing seat with a part-time forward-deployed hat. HVAC operators are not technical, and the software they have now has failed them. A large part of the job is going to customers to train, teach, and onboard them, then turning messy field feedback into product. The founders want a product engineer who is comfortable talking to technicians and business owners, on a call or on site, more than a forward-deployed engineer who happens to code.

Some days you ride in a truck with a plumber or an HVAC tech and watch how the product is actually used. Then you go back to the New York office and build. The deployments are not complicated and the users are not technical, so the work is empathy, product sense, and turning what you saw into sound architecture. Coding is the part they worry about least. The bar is whether you can design a good architecture and win over a technician in conversation.

You own the product end to end: architecture that scales and features that ship. You train and onboard non-technical home-services users. You turn unstructured field notes into the next build. You also help with in-person outbound at conferences. Bar: about 1 to 5 years, and fewer than about five years out of college is the shape they have in mind. Strong architecture. Real product sense. Comfortable with customers, and able to carry a conversation with a blue-collar worker. You could pitch the company. Startup experience, ideally zero to one, is what they want. Having been both a forward-deployed engineer and an engineer is a plus. Home-services, trades, or SMB software, or a Palantir-style forward-deployed background, is a plus. A pure heads-down engineer, someone whose only personality is engineering, or someone weak on architecture is a miss.

In office in New York, five days a week, and some Sundays are possible. Visa sponsorship is not available. US citizens and green-card holders only. OPT does not qualify. Equity is about 0.5% to 1%. Posted work intensity is 9-9-5. The process is a screen with the CEO, a technical interview with a co-founder that includes a simulated client call, then a one-day on-site work trial in New York.