Senior Product Engineer (Engineering-leaning)

**Kickoff** Senior Product Engineer (Engineering-leaning); $200K–$230K base + equity (0.2%–0.5%); New York City (On-site)

**About Company** Kickoff is the first platform to offer personal training covered by health insurance, on a mission to refocus healthcare on prevention. Clients are matched with a coach who is both a certified personal trainer and a registered dietitian, delivering a comprehensive program across exercise, nutrition, sleep, and disease prevention — with a human in the loop for accountability. Because Kickoff can demonstrate dramatic, measurable health improvements (clients targeting weight loss typically lose ~5% of body weight in the first two months), insurance partners foot the bill, making it $0 out-of-pocket for most members.

The company has scaled from $0 to a ~$17.3M annualized revenue pace in nine months — a pace rarely seen in health tech, with growth still accelerating (June revenue up 32% vs the same point in May) — backed by investors including 645 Ventures, FJ Labs, and Expa. The product integrates with the full range of wearables and health devices (Strava, Samsung Health, and more) to pull in far more signal on each client than a human could process, and uses the latest AI models to recommend the next best step for every client and coach.

**About the Role** This is first and foremost a software engineering role — roughly 90% engineering — for someone who is an engineer first and brings strong product intuition. You'll own features from idea to production with high autonomy and minimal process, working directly with the founder/CEO and the three existing product engineers (one of whom is CTO), plus occasional collaboration with the heads of growth and insurance operations. Much of the work centers on Kickoff's recommendation engine — taking rich client data, recommending behaviors to clients and coaches, measuring outcomes, and recursively improving the system — including a current rebuild of the workout-creation experience. This is the engineering-leaning of two Senior Product Engineer seats; the sibling seat carries the heavier product ownership.

**Responsibilities** - Own product areas end-to-end: discovery, hypotheses, specs, design direction, implementation, QA, launch, and metrics. - Build delightful consumer- and coach-facing experiences across web and mobile, using AI/agentic tools to ship fast. - Develop AI-powered features that personalize workouts, nutrition, habits, and sleep, and surface meaningful patterns in client data. - Improve LLM outputs over time with evals and fine-tuning for real-world impact. - Work directly with coaches and clients to find high-leverage problems and own the metrics you move.

**Required Skills** A. Operates at the bleeding edge of AI-assisted development — ships high-quality software at blistering speed using agentic tools every day; hands-on React/Node fundamentals with a real understanding of how the code works. B. Has built highly customized personal coding workflows and/or harnesses to maximize what's possible with Claude, Codex, and/or Cursor. C. Expert at improving LLM outputs over time with evals and fine-tuning.

**Bonus Skills** - Strong product judgment and UX instincts — can decide what to build, how it should work, and what to leave out, and use AI design tools to make it clean and clear (designer-level finesse not required). - Proven consumer / B2C / prosumer product experience — has demonstrably built beautiful, intuitive consumer-grade interfaces (consumerized B2B such as Mercury counts). - Can move from user interview to prototype to production quickly and independently. - Built health, wellness, fitness, or other relevant consumer products with excellent UX. - Has built AI agents that do valuable work for them or their company. - Has been a founder or early-startup employee. - Active in the NYC tech/startup community.

**Logistical Info** - Location: New York City, in-office 4–5 days/week (4-day minimum). Commute must be ~45 minutes or less — NYC, Jersey City, Hoboken, or close Westchester are fine; Princeton/New Haven-type commutes won't work. - Compensation: $200K–$230K base + 0.2%–0.5% equity. $230K is a hard ceiling; candidates who will only accept $250K+ are out of scope. - Number of openings: 1 — the engineering-leaning seat (one of two Senior Product Engineer hires; both being hired ASAP). - **Other:** Visa transfer sponsorship and relocation possible for the right candidate (transfers, not new visas).

**Ideal Background** - Strongest signal — insurance-covered consumer services (great talent pools for us): Headway, Grow Therapy, Talkiatry, Alma, Rula, Allara, Midi Health, Maven Clinic, Tia, Parsley Health, One Medical, Included Health, Ro, Hims & Hers, Thirty Madison, Spring Health, Modern Health. - Also strong — innovative, well-designed consumer wellness: Strava, AllTrails, Oura, Whoop, Levels, Eight Sleep, Tonal, Future, Ladder, Runna, Garmin, Headspace. - Also strong — other beautifully-designed consumer / consumerized B2B: Betterment, Mercury. - The Venn diagram (product + UX + coding + entrepreneurial + consumer) is demanding, but the right person is clear when you see them.

**Green Flags** - Entrepreneurial and high-urgency (KEY for their team) — forms own product hypotheses, pushes the company to move faster and do more, and owns their metrics and goals. - High autonomy and ownership; ships features end-to-end with little process. - Genuinely motivated by Kickoff's preventative-health mission. - AI-native: uses AI/agentic tools across research, design, build, and QA every day.

**Red Flags** - Backend-only or dev-tool/API engineer with no front-end/consumer surface. - Uses AI tooling only superficially — no custom workflows/harnesses, not pushing the edge. - Lukewarm or low-energy; waits for specs rather than forming their own hypotheses. - No demonstrable consumer-grade UI/UX work. - Comp expectations above the $230K ceiling; commute over ~45 minutes. - Currently at a direct competitor — Nourish, Fay, Berry Street (avoid outreach).

**Interview Process** 1. Round 1 — call with Jack (founder/CEO). 2. Round 2 — with senior product engineer Blake. 3. Round 3 — any additional questions from Jack; often skipped, otherwise in-person with Jack and possibly a few team members briefly. 4. Round 4 — paid 3-hour in-person project (paid hourly), working side-by-side with the product engineering team using AI tools, followed by a discussion. 5. Final round — with the head of operations, head of growth, an engineer, and Jack. Reference checks at the end.