Staff Product Engineer
About SportAI
SportAI builds AI-powered video analysis technology for racket sports – tennis, padel, and pickleball, with a mission to democratize access to pro-level match analysis and coaching solutions and help millions of players worldwide improve their game faster, track their journey, build their identity as athletes and have more fun doing it.
We're a small team at the seed stage, pushing towards a Series A. That means whoever owns a surface really owns it – each team member has a lot of ownership and uncapped opportunity for impact. In terms of how we work – we are genuinely AI-native. We build with AI coding agents every day – using them to plan, write, review, and ship is a core part of how a tiny team owns a large product surface at a high quality bar. We expect the people we hire to be fluent with these tools and to keep pushing the frontier of what they make possible.
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About the position
We're hiring a Staff Product Engineer to be the near-solo, full owner of our web product, SportAI Open. You'll own it end to end – making product decisions together with our CPTO and setting the technical direction, the AI integration, the front-end experience and the APIs behind it, and the quality bar that keeps it all shippable. You'll help decide what to build as well as how, and you'll do it with AI agents as a force multiplier.
This is the role for someone who wants the autonomy of a founding engineer without necessarily being a founder: a real product, real users, a serious engineering bar, and the trust to run with it.
Some of your main areas of responsibility will include:
- Own our web product, SportAI Open, end to end
- Make the architectural calls: how we use models, how we keep the product fast, private, and reliable, and what trade-offs are worth making. Set the direction the rest of the team will build on.
- Ship full-stack features by yourself – front-end, APIs, and the AI integration in between.
- Own and raise the quality bar – automated checks, security, performance.
- Translate product goals and user feedback into direction and then into shipped, polished experiences – and use your own product taste to fill the gaps.
- Use AI agents as a core part of your workflow to plan, build, review, and ship at a high pace, enabling us to iterate quickly to build a product loved by users and ready for global expansion
Who we are looking for
- 8+ years building and shipping production web applications end to end, with real ownership.
- Strong full-stack TypeScript: React (ideally Next.js / App Router), plus comfort designing and securing back-end APIs.
- Comfort across a modern cloud back-end – Supabase/Postgres, AWS S3, Vercel, PostHog, or similar.
- Demonstrated ability to work independently and own a product or major surface – you are able to make good judgment calls with available information and know when a decision needs a second opinion.
- Genuine fluency with AI-assisted development and a track record of using it to multiply your output
- Comfort working against a high, automated quality bar (types, tests, linting, security checks) and treating it as an enabler, not a chore.
- Strong product instincts: you care about what the user actually experiences, not just what compiles.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience integrating LLMs in production – streaming, structured outputs, prompt design, cost and latency awareness.
- Computer vision / ML experience or experience working alongside CV/ML engineers
- Passion for sports, ideally racket sports.
- Early-stage startup experience.
How we work / what makes this role unusual
- You'll own a real AI + computer-vision product, not a slice of one.
- AI-native by default: we build with AI agents daily and expect you to push that frontier.
- High automated quality bar so you can move fast and still sleep at night.
- Tiny team, no bureaucracy, direct line to users and to product decisions.