Product Engineer
Ship polished workflows for CFOs, controllers, and finance teams.
Location:NYC - On-site
Employment type:Full-time
Compensation:$200K - $300K base | Equity | Performance bonus
About Specter
Specter is building an autonomous accounting system that can be deployed at every company. Our agents run payables, receivables, reconciliations, and the close for finance teams that have spent decades duct-taping spreadsheets to legacy ERPs.
The hard part of this problem isn't language models - it's context. Every company books revenue differently, codes expenses differently, and defines "done" differently. The accountant who's been doing the work for ten years has all of this in their head. Specter builds the systems that capture it, structure it, and let agents act on it correctly. Our platform learns each customer's data, processes, and rules over time, so the work our agents do is the work a senior accountant would actually sign off on.
We're a small, dense team in NYC. VC-backed, real customers, real revenue, zero churn so far. Accounting is fundamental to every company in the world, and we intend to build the system that handles it end to end.
The role
Specter's customers are CFOs, controllers, and VPs of Finance. Their expertise is finance, not software, and they have little tolerance for ambiguity, extra work, or unexplained automation. They evaluate our product the way anyone evaluates software they have to use every day: does this make my job easier, or is it one more tab I have to keep open. The product engineer makes sure the answer is the first one, and keeps making sure as the product grows.
You'll own surfaces of the product end to end, with a heavy emphasis on UX, polish, and the parts of the experience that turn a useful tool into the first place a finance team goes to review, approve, and explain work. The bar isn't "works" - the bar is "the customer's team chooses to open Specter before they open their ERP."
What you'll do
- Take ownership of major surfaces: the review and approval flow, the agent communications log, the interfaces that show what the system knows about each customer, the reporting dashboard.
- Design with code. Mock in Figma if you want, but the bar is what ships in production. Iteration speed matters more than fidelity of the mock.
- Make the product feel obvious. Finance teams shouldn't need a training session to use it. Onboarding should be the product, not a separate experience.
- Sit in on customer calls. Ship the fix before the call ends when you can. The customers who feel heard are the customers who renew and expand.
- Push back on bad ideas, including ours. The job is to make the product better, not to translate specs.
What we look for
- Strong frontend (React, TypeScript) with real backend capability. You can stand up an endpoint without asking, and you can read a Postgres query plan.
- Demonstrated design taste. Either you have a design background, or your past work speaks for itself when we look at it.
- Empathy for the user, especially the non-technical one. You can sit through a customer demo and watch where they hesitate.
- Genuine curiosity about how accounting actually works. You don't need to come in knowing what a journal entry is; you need to be the kind of person who wants to learn.
Nice to have
- Built tools for finance, ops, or legal teams.
- Strong opinions on the difference between minimal UI and empty UI.
- Worked on a product where the user is paid to be careful - domains like accounting, healthcare, or compliance reward this.
Interested in joining? Apply now
Complete the short application and attach your resume. Links to work you are proud of are more useful than a polished cover letter.