Palona AI

AI agents with emotional sales intelligence

AI Software Engineer - Product

AI Application Engineering +1Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Full-timeLos Altos, CA, USA

About the Job

Requirements

At least 3 years of industrial experience in a relevant technical domain.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.
Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack.
Experience building with large language models, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.
Product judgment to simplify scope, identify high-leverage user problems, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product.
Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems.
A strong quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience.
Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment.
AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment.

Responsibilities

Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration.
Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.
Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.
Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities.
Integrate with point-of-sale, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints.
Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved.
Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience.
Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness.
Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous.
Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring.

AI Software Engineer, Product

Palona AI · Los Altos, United States · Full-time · Posted 2026-08-11

Workplace: on_site

Department: Product Engineering

Description

We are looking for a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in the real world. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems. The job begins with a customer or product problem and ends when the solution is operating successfully in production—not when a model call works locally.

You may work on voice ordering, reservations, catering, restaurant operations, client configuration, analytics, or entirely new agent capabilities. You will collaborate directly with product, design, customer-facing teams, and restaurant operators; make fast product and technical tradeoffs; and own the quality of the resulting experience.

Our stack includes Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js applications, real-time voice agents built with LiveKit, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and modern LLM, speech, and multimodal providers. Exact stack match is less important than full-stack range, product judgment, and a record of shipping.

What you’ll own

Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration.
Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.
Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.
Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities.
Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints.
Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved.
Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience—not only within one layer of the stack.
Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness.
Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous.
Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring.

Requirements

3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.
Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack.
Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.
Product judgment: you can simplify scope, identify the highest-leverage user problem, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product.
Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems.
A strong quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience.
Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment.
AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment.

Benefits

Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan.
Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable.
Family Leave
Short Term & Long Term Disability
Paid time off and company holidays.
Learning and development support.

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About the Company

Palona AI

AI agents with emotional sales intelligence

Palona AI builds AI agents that enhance customer interactions by adding emotional intelligence and human-like qualities to large language models. They tailor and deploy personalized AI agents for businesses to improve sales processes and customer engagement, delivering customized buying journeys that aim to boost conversion rates and loyalty. The agents integrate emotion-aware language models with a company’s workflows to understand needs, respond naturally, and guide conversations toward purchase or support goals. By combining industry veterans and academic leaders, Palona AI focuses on precise personalization and context-aware interactions in retail and service sectors to help businesses boost sales effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

Company size: 11-50
Company stage: Seed
Total funding: $10M
Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
Founded: 2024

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