Product Engineer

Department: Product

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Shipd is our gamified data collection platform that transforms boring annotation into an addictive, competitive experience. 16,000+ contributors have signed up organically because “nerds want to get paid to code.” With quest-based campaigns, bounty rewards, streaks, and community features, Shipd aims to attracts the best talent for complex data production. Now we’re looking for a Product Engineer to help us scale the platform into the “Duolingo for coding bounties” or “Kaggle but paid”

What You’ll Do

• Build the Quest Builder system: Create reusable components, UI generators, and multi-step pipelines that shrink quest setup from a week to a day.

• Own developer experience tooling: Extend our VS Code fork, browser extension (Moody Blues), and trace viewer to capture long-form coding workflows with full observability.

• Scale the data flywheel: Design features that make the platform engaging enough to bring friends, raise quality through competition, and support any data format without starting from scratch.

• Engineer quality at scale: Improve our three-tier eval system (automation, judge models, human review), build real-time feedback, and empower top contributors to become reviewers.

• Ship addictive experiences: Blend game mechanics, developer tools, and marketplace dynamics into products that make hours-long data tasks feel rewarding.

You’ll Succeed Here If You Have

• Strong product engineering experience—you can own features end-to-end across frontend, backend, and data.

• A knack for building systems that scale—infrastructure, pipelines, and abstractions that work across many use cases.

• Experience with developer tools (e.g., IDEs, extensions, SDKs, CLIs) or platforms with heavy telemetry/observability.

• Curiosity about game design, marketplaces, or community products—how to keep people motivated and engaged.

• Excellent communication and product sense—you can frame trade-offs clearly and design with both users and internal teams in mind.

• Comfort with ambiguity—happy to prototype, iterate fast, and pivot based on feedback.

Characteristics We’re Looking For

• Builder’s mindset: scrappy, resourceful, motivated by hard problems.

• Excited by human-AI collaboration and how product design shapes outcomes.

• Pride in craft: you care about both quality and speed.

• Desire to help define the “experience foundations” for frontier data collection.

Nice to Have

• Experience in AI/ML, crowdsourcing platforms, or online education/gamification.

• Familiarity with marketplace dynamics or contributor ecosystems.

• Background in scaling evaluation or quality systems for complex work.