Founding Product Engineer

What Popcorn does

We build AI agents that work as employees for e-commerce brands. They sell products, handle support, and follow up with customers across messaging channels.

Not chatbots. Actual AI agents that hold real conversations, recommend products, handle objections, and close sales. Our agents have already generated millions of dollars in revenue for our brands and managed millions of conversations. We're on track for $1M ARR.

The product compounds — every conversation makes the AI smarter. We're building toward a future where the AI runs entire customer operations autonomously. Right now we're in the Middle East. The US market is next. Backed by Right Side Capital, Salica, and world-class angels from Silicon Valley and the GCC.

Why this role exists

I'm Yousef — founder, based in Dubai. We've been growing Popcorn for a year and a half and the traction has been outstanding — but we're at the point where the product is growing faster than we can keep up. We're scaling the engineering team to go to the next level: US market expansion, deeper product capabilities, and the infrastructure to support it all.

You'd work directly with me. No layers, no product managers, no design committees. The stack is Node.js, React, and AWS — but in this environment, what you've worked with before matters less than how you think.

This is an AI-first engineering role.

This isn't a traditional engineering job where you write code all day. This is a role where your judgment, critical thinking, and ability to leverage AI is what matters.

Your team is Claude, Cursor, and you. AI agents write most of the code. Your job is to direct them — decide what to build, architect how it fits together, review what they produce, and own what ships. One engineer working this way does what used to take a team of four or five. That's not a theory — it's how we've been building for a year and a half.

What This Means In Practice

• You spend more time thinking than typing. The hard part isn't writing code — it's knowing what to build and why.
• You make architectural decisions that affect a production system serving paying brands. AI can generate code. It can't decide what's safe to ship under pressure.
• You operate AI agents the way a tech lead operates a team. You assign work, review output, catch what they miss, course-correct, and ship.
• You're constantly evaluating: is this AI output good enough? Where are the edge cases? What did it miss? That critical eye is the skill.
  
  

The engineer we're looking for treats AI as a multiplier, not a shortcut. You don't just accept what Claude generates — you understand it, challenge it, improve it, and know when to throw it out and think from scratch.

What you'd own

First few weeks: You get full context on the product and codebase — I'll walk you through everything. Then you start shipping. The work that matters most right now is making the product more valuable to our brands and more reliable as we grow.

First few months: You own the technical side of our expansion — new markets, deeper product capabilities, and the infrastructure to support it all. You're making the decisions about what scales and what doesn't.

Where this goes: You're the technical leader of a product that talks to thousands of customers every day. As we grow, you shape the engineering org — hiring, tooling, architecture, everything.

Who thrives here

• You're product-obsessed. You don't just write code — you need to understand the business, the customer, the problem. You want to know why a brand's AI agent isn't converting, not just how to fix a bug. If you're not curious about e-commerce, how people buy through conversations, and what makes an AI agent actually useful — this won't work. The engineer who succeeds here is as obsessed with the product as they are with the code.
• You have strong taste. You care about the details — how the product feels, how the code reads, how the experience lands for the customer. You're not just shipping features; you have opinions about what good looks like and you fight for it.
• You think before you build. You ask "should we build this?" before "how do we build this?" You've seen enough systems to know that the best code is often the code you don't write.
• AI is your default. You already use AI tools to write code, debug, and move faster. You've developed your own sense of when to trust AI output and when to question it. You'd feel weird doing something manually that a machine could do.
• You've owned something in production. Not contributed to — owned. You know what it feels like when something breaks and you're the person who fixes it.
• You make decisions with incomplete information and own the outcome either way. You don't wait for perfect specs or committee approval.
• You care about results, not hours. We don't track time. We track whether the product is getting better every day.
• You feel the urgency. We're at a moment in AI that won't come back. The window where a small team can build something that competes with companies 100x our size is open right now — and it won't stay open forever. If that excites you more than it exhausts you, we're aligned. If you're looking for a 9-to-5 with clear boundaries, this isn't the right fit — and that's okay.
  
  

About Me And How I Work

I bring the customer context, the business problem, and the product judgment. You bring the technical judgment. When we disagree, I expect you to tell me why I'm wrong. I want someone who protects the system from my instincts when they'd break it.

We sync daily — things move fast and we need to stay aligned. I'm not reviewing every PR — I'm trusting your judgment and expecting you to flag things that need my eyes.

Compensation

Salary: Competitive, based on experience.

Equity: 0.25–0.5% ESOP