Product Engineer, Systems

IPRally is building a new generation of AI powered tools for understanding patents and technical knowledge. We're growing our Product Engineering team and looking to hire one to three engineers.

Software engineering is changing quickly as AI agents become capable of doing more of the implementation work. We think that makes engineering judgment more important, not less. Our engineers need to understand why we're building something, how it should work, and how the pieces fit together, while using agents effectively to turn that thinking into working software.

For this role, we're particularly interested in engineers who naturally think in systems: how our product, data, infrastructure and agents fit together, where things can break, and how we design software that remains reliable as both the product and the way we build it evolve.

You'll work in a small, autonomous team with other engineers, usually alongside a Product Manager and a Product Designer. Which team you join depends on your strengths and interests, and it can change later.

What you'll do

You'll keep the big picture of how our product, data and agents work together, and make technical decisions that let product teams move quickly without weakening the system underneath them.

You'll design the architecture for both people and agents: the boundaries, abstractions and shared guardrails that let agents build safely across the whole system, beyond what any one team's tests can catch.

You'll review what agents and engineers produce with the whole system in mind: not just whether the code works, but its failure modes, security, performance and cost.

You'll make important technical decisions explicit, so that both engineers and agents can build on them.

What we're looking for

This role could be a strong fit if you:

• Have a strong software engineering background and have designed, built and operated production systems.

• Think naturally about systems rather than individual components, including data flow, dependencies, failure modes, security, performance and cost.

• Can make architectural decisions without overengineering, balancing what the system needs today with where it is likely to go.

• Can explain complex systems and technical decisions clearly enough that other engineers can understand and build on them.

• Already use AI coding agents as a meaningful part of your day to day engineering work, and understand both their capabilities and their failure modes.

• Are interested in designing systems and engineering practices that allow agents to take on more implementation work safely, rather than simply using AI as a faster autocomplete.

• Are comfortable taking ownership of problems that don't fit neatly inside one feature or component.

Experience with search, ML systems or large datasets is an advantage, but isn't required.

How we build

Our engineers aren't measured by how much code they personally type. We're much more interested in whether you can understand a system, make good technical decisions and use the tools available to turn those decisions into reliable software.

AI agents are already a normal part of how we build at IPRally, and we expect that to keep changing quickly. Keeping our code easy for agents to work in is everyone's job: each engineer adds the tests, lint rules and checks their part of the product needs, so agents can take on more of the work. You'll have considerable room to experiment with how you work and help shape what effective agentic software development looks like for the team.

Our current stack includes Clojure, ClojureScript, Python, Postgres, Temporal, and GCP. You don't need previous experience with it or with patent technology: we're much more interested in your engineering judgment and ability to learn.

The salary range for the role is €5,500–7,000/month, with equity on top.

The role reports to our Engineering Manager, Product Engineering.