Founding Product Engineer (aka Vibe Coder)

Founding Product Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (In-Person)
Job Type: Full-time
Compensation: $110K–$160K + 0.25%–1.00% equity (based on experience)

About Cartage

Cartage is building Wilson, an AI that coordinates freight for manufacturers and distributors—handling the tedious work of booking, tracking, and managing shipments end-to-end. Our customers range from lumber mills to furniture manufacturers.

With Wilson, teams can offload their entire logistics function and scale infinitely at a fraction of the cost of a human team.

Backed by Y Combinator (S24) and a $3.3M seed round, we’ve hit an inflection point in revenue growth and are scaling the team to meet accelerating demand.

Our Culture

Cartage is a startup for builders who want full ownership. No PMs. No middle managers. Engineers own the customer experience end-to-end—from “what should we build?” to “it’s live and customers love it.”

Our Core Values:

Taste: Companies win on taste. Engineering is a creative discipline—part logic, part art—and we care deeply about how things feel, how they’re named, and how they scale. We sweat the small stuff because it compounds.

Extreme Ownership: Everyone runs their domain like a founder. You own problems end-to-end. No handoffs, no waiting—just clear goals and the autonomy to build.

Radical Transparency: You’ll see everything—from product decisions to monthly investor updates. We move faster when everyone has full context.

We’re an in-person team in San Francisco, CA, and believe deeply in building together in real life.

Why This Role Matters

We’re onboarding a growing list of shippers and manufacturers—and your job is to make that first experience seamless, fast, and delightful. As our first Product Engineer, you’ll own the process of getting new customers live from scratch, blending technical problem-solving with product intuition.

This is not a ticket-taker role. You’ll work side-by-side with the founders and take ownership of critical infrastructure, architecture, and AI design decisions from day one.What You’ll Do

• Own onboarding end-to-end: From “we signed a new customer” to “they’re live and scaling,” you’ll design and build every step of the journey.
• Talk to users often: You’ll be in the room (or Zoom) talking to customers —and you’ll be the one making sure everything is seamless.
• Vibe Code: We are an AI first development culture. Leverage Claude Code and ship fast. It’s 90% vibe coding—quick feedback loops, smart AI pair programming, and direct user feedback.
• Configure Wilson: Setup Wilson to duplicate the manufacturers current way of working.
• Collaborate across the stack: Work closely with logistics, engineering, and founders to translate real-world edge cases into scalable systems.

You Might Be a Fit If You...

• Think like a PM, build like an engineer: You can turn a customer interview into a working prototype before the call ends.
• Live in customer problems: You’re happiest digging into how a workflow actually works and then simplifying it down to a button.
• Have strong product taste: You care about how things feel, not just how they function.
• Don’t wait for specs: You’re used to building in the gray—high ambiguity, high agency, low ego.
• Are full-stack enough: You can throw up a form, tweak an LLM prompt, hit a webhook, and move on.
• Vibe with speed: You love the idea of iterating with Claude Code and getting something in front of users today, not next sprint.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity – Ownership as an early team member
• Competitive salary – $110K–$160K depending on experience
• Full health/dental/vision – 100% covered
• High trust, high ownership environment – Zero micromanagement
• A real shot at something big – Help define the future of AI in logistics