Product Engineer

ABOUT YUZU Health insurance is a $1.3 trillion industry powered by fax machines, Excel macros, and misaligned incentives. Yuzu is rebuilding health plan administration from scratch. We're replacing the patchwork of disconnected vendors, hidden fees, and opaque pricing with a single platform that gives employers real transparency and control over their health spend. We bring innovative health plans to life by administering plans that expand healthcare access for small employers, deliver price transparency to members and providers, and simplify eligibility for brokers. Yuzu’s goal is to make it as easy for any business to create and manage a custom health plan as it is to create a storefront on Shopify. We’re backed by General Catalyst, Anthropic, Chemistry, Lachy Groom and many unicorn founders, including leaders at Stripe, OpenAI, Brex, Deel, Mercury, and Notion. Our team is small, technical, and moves fast. We care about craftsmanship, think from first principles, and believe insurance is one of the most important but under-built categories in software. THE ROLE Product engineers own features end-to-end, not just the code. You'll work directly with customers and our operations team to identify product gaps, find the clearest path through ambiguous problems, and ship new features from 0 to 1. There is no PM in the middle. You own outcomes, not just code. You will move across the stack to deliver features, touching frontend, backend, databases, APIs, and more. Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer aptly describes what we look for in “product-minded engineers https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engineer/#tips-to-become-a-more-product-minded-engineer”: "Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide to give up the joy of engineering." LOCATION AND CULTURE We're strong believers in an in-person culture. Our HQ is in NYC near Union Square. Yuzu exists because healthcare infrastructure is broken. Not because the problems are inherently hard, but because bad incentives have made simple processes complicated. We're building the platform that allows health plan innovators to skip the mess and move fast. That mission shapes how we operate day to day. We don't soften bad news, hedge our conclusions, or let politeness outrun clarity. If something is broken, we say so. To each other, to our customers, and in our product decisions. We expect you to do the same. We're a small team where everyone operates full-stack on problems. You'll sometimes do work that isn't in your job title, and that should sound like a perk, not a burden. We ship, learn, and iterate. Healthcare is full of "that's just how it works" explanations. We question that default. We want someone who reasons through tradeoffs independently rather than waiting for a playbook. Yuzu isn't the right place for everyone, and we'd rather be upfront about that. We have very few meetings, flexible outlines, and a lot of autonomy. No one’s checking whether you look busy. You'll need to develop your own sense of what matters and act on it. Some people find that energizing. Others find it disorienting. Whether Yuzu is the right fit is just a question of which environment makes you do your best work. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Complexity wrangler We move money, operate in a complex space, and serve employers, members, brokers, and a multitude of other user types. Our systems are complex by nature. You're someone who can navigate that complexity and keep things simple where it counts. Thrives in chaos Things change, surprises happen, and not everything is in our control. You're comfortable with ambiguity and don't let it slow you down. Sweats the details We’re building a platform that plays a major role in all of our members’ lives. Every pixel, every error state, every edge case matters. You care about the user experience as much as the architecture underneath it. AI-excited Most of our code is written by AI. We're figuring out what software engineering looks like when that's true, and we want people who are energized by that, not threatened by it. REQUIREMENTS Smart > Experienced We don't care what languages or frameworks you've used before. If you're smart, you'll figure it out. We use Typescript, Svelte, and Nest, but what matters to us is that you can build things that work. AI-native You are on the cutting edge of AI tools. You use Cursor, Codex, Claude, or your favorite CLI. Not as a novelty, but as a core part of how you generate code and think through problems. Full-stack You can build and ship a feature end-to-end. Frontend, backend, database, deploy. No hand-offs, no waiting around. EXAMPLE PROJECTS YuzuSign D*cuSign was a friction point, so a single engineer replaced it in weeks with a purpose-built signing platform deeply integrated into the rest of our stack. What required thousands of engineers within a publicly traded company is now within reach of a single focused engineer with the right tools. Real-Time Money Ledger We move hundreds of millions of dollars every month. Most platforms piece together where that money is with batch reports and spreadsheets. We built a real-time double-entry ledger that tracks every financial event as it happens. Cash Cards When members pay out of pocket for care, the experience is usually clunky: pay upfront, submit receipts, wait for reimbursement. We built a prepaid health card that simplifies that experience for members and grants them greater access to affordable care. And because we own the full stack, every swipe flows straight through to the same ledger and claims system that manages their benefits. BENEFITS - $160k – $265k plus equity depending on experience - Unlimited vacation days - Medical, dental, & vision insurance - 401K with 1% match - Unlimited AI tokens & tool budget — Cursor, Claude, Codex, you name it - Apple equipment - Free lunch daily and plenty of food and drinks - $3k in reimbursement for classes and conferences BROWNIE POINTS - You are a former founder or a future one. - You have experience with payments, security, or "compliance"-type problems. - You’ve scaled systems with 100k / 1m / 10m / 100m / 1b transactions. - You thrive on building 0-to-1 product experiments faster than anyone else, from napkin sketches to shipped MVP before the week is out. PROCESS If we interview you, you can expect the following process: - A 30 min intro call - A 45 min - 1 hr technical interview - A 30 minute project deep dive - An onsite loop incorporating a practical programming exercise, a system design interview and a product interview - We may speak with 1-2 references you provide. In-person 5 days/week in NYC office required