Founding Product Engineer
Team: Engineering
Location: Hybrid / Remote (Boston preferred)
About Rocket
Rocket Alumni Solutions is a fast growing startup focused on delivering software solutions to help communities collect, organize, and use their history to achieve their goals.
Role Description
You’ll be Rocket’s first Product Lead: a modern AI-native builder, solo IC, and product partner to the CEO who turns ideas into impact fast. You’ll deeply understand K-16 school admins through customer conversations, data, and direct engagement, then own the full product lifecycle with clarity, conviction, and urgency. You’ll prototype quickly, ship faster, align sales, marketing, CS, engineering, and leadership around the roadmap, and help build the systems that keep everyone moving without needing to be in every room. Bring your best builder with you (if you please).
At Rocket, builders get a ridiculous amount of leverage. Our agent harness, CI/CD, automated tests, reusable primitives, and infra-as-code stack let you go from idea to shipped product with very little drag. You will not be stuck writing specs into the void. You will work in a developer experience built for fast loops, real agents, and production-grade shipping.
Excellence in this role combines product leadership and product engineering.
Role Responsibilities
Building & Shipping Delightful Experiences (~60%)
Rapid agentic prototyping
Define and enforce a "definition of done"
Personally own and validate the product lifecycle through customer adoption
Say “No” - Protect the team's focus by making data driven prioritization calls
Guide the engineering team towards building faster tooling that enables you to build & ship
Product Adoption (~20%)
Track product performance
Understand customer behavior
Monitor market trends, emerging technologies, and competitor movements
Product Roadmap (~10%)
Convert the long-term strategy into an executable roadmap
Own the roadmap with conviction, even when pressure comes from leadership, sales, or customers
Pressure-test the roadmap with customer signals, usage data, and market insight to challenge assumptions and surface blind spots
Communication & Alignment (~10%)
Exude energy, innovation, excitement with a “yes and” mentality
Maintain team focus on the product roadmap and long term strategy
Build systems that collect and process product feedback without manual intervention
Embed critical thinking, judgement, product taste into the agentic pipelines to scale product communication
Requirements
5+ years shipping delightful SaaS products
Current / recent $5m+ venture funded experience
Expert builder (Claude Code, Replit, Loveable, Cursor, Figma, Photoshop)
Portfolio / track record of products with daily usage
Experience working directly with a founder/CEO as a strategic partner
Experience designing product processes from 0 to 1
Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science or related field (a plus)
Open source contributions (a plus)