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4 days ago
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Gaurav Chande / June 13, 2025 (570 Words, 4 Minutes)
product engineer engineering product
Last week I saw a LinkedIn post looking for a “Forward Deployed AI Engineer,” which sounds like someone you’d airdrop into a hostile market with a laptop and a case of Red Bull. This week, it’s the “GenAI Application Engineer.” It’s the same job-title churn we’ve seen for a decade, and it’s hiding a simple truth: you’re not looking for a new type of person, you’re looking for a classic Product Engineer who has simply mastered a powerful new set of tools.
I get it. Hype cycles demand new jargon, VCs need to fund new categories, and maybe “Product Engineer” sounds too plain, too close to the unglamorous work of actually talking to customers. So we stick neon decals on the title. But this whole circus is a distraction from the real, far more costly problem: we’re systematically failing to identify and hire the engineers who actually drive startup success.
Product Engineers aren’t just another type of hire – they’re the hidden variable of high-performing teams. While we obsess over technical credentials and algorithm knowledge, the engineers who can collapse the space between customer problems and working solutions are slipping through our broken interview processes.
The magic of a great Product Engineer has never been about the shine. It’s their obsession with momentum. They don’t worship a particular framework or programming language or insert-new-buzzword-technology. They worship getting things done.
Five years ago, that meant masterfully wiring up a React front-end to a Rails/Node.js API and deploying on Heroku. Today, that same person is using completely different tools. They’re spinning up coding agents in Cursor. They’re building workflows where an LLM can plan, fix bugs, merge PRs. They’re using RepoPrompt to feed AI context from private codebases and implementing MCP servers for tool integration.
The stack is a world apart. The instinct is the same. It’s the same drive to leverage the most powerful tools of the day to solve the problem at hand. They are still abstracting away the deepest infrastructure (they’re not building the foundation models themselves) and using the highest-leverage platforms to get from a messy human problem to a working solution.
That’s why today’s interview rituals are broken. And why they scare away the very people who could 10× your velocity. You still ask candidates to solve coding puzzles on a whiteboard, and the person we actually need – the one who can take a vague customer complaint and ship a solution in an afternoon – politely draws some circles while wondering if anyone at this company has ever met a real user.
Test them on what they’ll actually do! Give them a handful of real customer tickets from your actual codebase and see what they do. In 2025, focus on the single greatest point of leverage a modern engineer has: their ability to wield AI as a partner.
The interview transforms from a quiz into a live-action diagnostic, answering the real questions. You see if they treat an LLM like a mindless oracle or a Socratic partner; if they brainstorm different technical approaches first, or get stuck in expensive, token-wasting loops. You see if they can break down problems into granular tasks that AI can execute correctly. You’re not testing for traditional coding skills anymore. You’re testing for critical thought, taste, and their written communication, in the age of AI.
And here’s what really matters: this mindset doesn’t just make for a better hire, it creates unstoppable product momentum. The person who mastered the art of the full-stack web app is the same person who now masters agentic workflows. Their real talent isn’t knowing a specific technology; it’s their relentless drive to find the shortest path from problem to solution. That instinct, combined with modern AI tooling, is genuinely transformative – but only if your interview process can actually recognize it.
So let’s retire the costume titles. Call them what they are: Product Engineers. Give them real problems to solve, modern tools to solve them with, and then get out of their way. And if tomorrow LinkedIn tries to sell me on a “Holistic Prompt Stack Synergist,” I’m building a Chrome extension that replaces these terms with two simple words: Product Engineer.
A quick hat tip: Like a lot of industry terms, the exact origin of “Product Engineer” is murky. Facebook was one of the earliest to build its engineering culture around the idea. The term was also heavily championed by leaders like Jean-Michel Lemieux (JML) during his time at Atlassian and later Shopify.
© 2025 Gaurav Chande • Theme Moonwalk
