Product Engineer

**Caspian** Product Engineer; $180K–$250K base + equity, signing bonus available; San Francisco (On-site)

**About Company** Caspian is the AI-native trade advisor, on a mission to help companies secure over $1B in tariff refunds over the next two years. The product ingests messy trade and shipping data, uses AI to structure it, and files duty drawback and tariff refund claims directly with the U.S. federal government — Caspian holds its own CBP-approved customs broker license and ABI certification, a rare regulatory moat in the space.

Since obtaining that license ~15 months ago, Caspian has scaled from $0 to a $4M revenue run rate with a team of 10 in San Francisco, and is currently closing a new financing round. Backers include Primary Venture Partners (lead, board seat) and Blank Ventures.

Founders Justin Sherlock (CEO) and Matt Ebeweber worked together at Flexport before starting Caspian — Matt on the customs engineering team, Justin leading Flexport Capital's trade finance and lending group.

**About the Role** One of three Product Engineer seats Caspian is hiring for over the next 60 days. This is a full-stack, high-autonomy generalist role — there's no dedicated PM or designer, so engineers work directly with the business team and customers, form their own view of what to build, and own it end to end. Several current engineers have built entire revenue-generating product lines solo, alongside just a salesperson and a customer.

**Responsibilities** - Own features end-to-end across the stack for Caspian's AI-native trade and customs product. - Work directly with the business team and customers to define what gets built next. - Apply AI/LLM tooling to structure messy, real-world trade and shipping data. - Ship and iterate quickly within a small (10-person) team, taking large areas of ownership. - Build and evolve production systems over time rather than one-off prototypes.

**Required Skills** A. 4–10 years of professional software engineering experience, including at least one 2+ year seat where they built and owned a system through its evolution. B. Full-stack generalist — comfortable owning a feature from backend through frontend without a dedicated PM or designer. C. Has built B2B or internal-workflow software where the user is a business operator, not a consumer. Fintech or regulated exposure is a plus, not a requirement. D. Applied engineering focus rather than an ML-research or PhD-track background.

**Bonus Skills** - Prior exposure to trade, customs, logistics, or supply chain (not required — Caspian can ramp strong engineers up quickly). - Experience at a company like C3 AI, Happy Robot, or a vertical logistics/trade startup.

**Logistical Info** - Location: San Francisco, 3 days/week on-site. Some flexibility has been extended to exceptional candidates relocating from out of market. - Compensation: $180K–$250K base + equity, signing bonus available, with line of sight to roughly $100K/year of equity value at the top of the band. - Number of openings: 3 - **Other:** Company is closing a new funding round and expects to roughly triple its valuation over the next 12 months.

**Ideal Background** - Must have real time inside a mature engineering organization working on a system at scale. Founder-only, agency, and legacy non-tech-first backgrounds do not clear the bar. - Genuine curiosity about cross-border trade, logistics, and geopolitics. - Comparable companies: C3 AI, Happy Robot, vertical logistics/trade startups. Avoid legacy freight companies and recent (last ~2 years) Flexport hires specifically — client noted Flexport's own bar has dropped. - Narrow room for one more senior/staff-level (7–15 YOE) hands-on "player-coach" within the 3 seats, but the primary bar for all three is the 2–6 YOE generalist profile above. - No visa sponsorship, including H-1B transfers.

**Green Flags** - 2+ year average tenure, with a concrete story about a system they built and watched evolve. - Curiosity or intensity outside of pure engineering credentials. - Fintech, regulated-space, or B2B workflow background.

**Red Flags** - Primarily consumer-product background (large-scale A/B testing on consumer data) — client said explicitly this doesn't translate to Caspian's smaller-data, workflow-heavy B2B work. - Average tenure under 2 years, or more than one sub-1-year stint. This is the most cited rejection reason on the role. - ML-research or PhD-track background with limited applied/production experience. - Junior-level experience (under ~2 years) with comp expectations at or above the top of the band. - Comp expectations above $250K base.

**Interview Process** 1. **Hiring screen** — 30-minute conversation with the team. 2. **Technical** — 1-hour technical assessment. 3. **Behavioral or second technical** — If enough signal was gathered from the first technical, proceed to a behavioral interview. If not, a second technical interview is conducted. 4. **Onsite** — Includes a deep dive, systems design, and a behavioral interview.