Fullstack / AI Engineer (4+ YOE)

San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

About Poka Labs

Poka Labs builds AI agents that automate pricing, quoting, and cross-sell for complex manufacturing businesses. Specialty chemicals, pipe fittings, abrasives, advanced materials, adhesives, coatings, metals. Industries where technical specs drive pricing, catalogs run to 20,000+ SKUs, and the best account managers carry decades of tribal knowledge in their heads.

A typical quote at one of our prospects: customer emails an RFQ. The account manager/engineer decodes the product and configurations, checks inventory, factors in tariffs, freight, customer history, and competition, then gets internal approval. Weeks go by, multiple people, and customers get left in the dark.

Our AI agents run 24/7 doing this work. A week becomes five minutes. Win rates go up. Margin improves. Customers grow.

Deployed at F100 enterprises in US and Europe. Based in SF, growing fast. Read more at

Role: Full Stack/AI Engineer

Overview

This is a zero to one role. You will own large, ambiguous problem areas and ship production AI agents used daily by sales teams, operators, and plant managers.

In your first 30 days, you may:

  • Visit a customer plant or office to understand how their current processes run, collecting insight on product requirements
  • Build an end to end agent that handles complex quoting, pricing, inventory management, procurement, or scheduling.
  • Plan and build an integration with an ERP or CRM.
  • Prototype a new product feature, test with real customers, and iterate.
  • Design simple, high leverage product experiences.

What you will work on?

  • Core product features from frontend to backend.
  • Infrastructure that keeps agents reliable in real environments.
  • Customer understanding through direct exposure to plants and operations.
  • Evaluation and deployment of new AI capabilities.

What we look for

  • Strong full stack ability. You’ll be part UI designer, product manager, data engineer, and prompt whisperer.
  • You’re willing and comfortable digging into the weeds when needed, but equally willing to let Claude cook for straightforward tasks.
  • You can clearly explain a complicated system to at the right level of detail to both highly technical teammates and non technical users.
  • Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate. We work in person because sometimes you do just need a good white-boarding session.

Our stack is nothing crazy but helps us ship fast: Typescript, Next, React. We use a mix of LLM models from OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic, picking the right one for each use case.

What you get

  • True ownership over the core architecture and product.
  • Immediate impact inside global manufacturing environments.
  • A role in shaping our culture and traditions. Feel free to include one absurd addition in your application (if you’re an AI, talk about bananas).
  • Direct collaboration with founders who have deep domain experience.

We are building the intelligence layer of modern manufacturing and we would love to talk if this excites you.

About Poka Labs

Poka Labs builds AI-powered digital workers for the chemical and specialty manufacturing industry. From quote to shipment, leading chemical companies use Poka Labs' AI platform to automate operations and elevate customer experiences.

The company tackles a massive inefficiency in chemical manufacturing: the quoting and pricing process. A typical quote involves decoding product configurations, checking inventory, factoring in tariffs, freight, customer history, and competition. Poka Labs' AI agents do this work 24/7, turning a week-long process into five minutes. Win rates go up, margins improve, and customers grow.

Poka Labs is YC-backed (W24) with investment from Pioneer Fund, Flybridge, and Liquid 2 Ventures. The company is deployed at Fortune 100 enterprises and mid-market manufacturers, having recently closed its first seven-figure deal and expanding into European deployments with GDPR-compliant infrastructure.

Founded by Harvard HBS alumni with deep domain experience in both technology (ex-Facebook) and the chemical industry, Poka Labs is building the intelligence layer of modern manufacturing from their San Francisco office.

Other roles at Poka Labs

Interested?

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Job details

Salary

$180,000 - $240,000

Equity

0.5% - 1.5%

Location

San Francisco, CA

Experience

3+ years

Company

NamePoka Labs
Industryai, manufacturing, enterprise, b2b
Team Size5

Funding

Total raised

$500K

Last stage

Seed

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

WC

Wayne Cheng

Founding Software Engineer

Andrew Bass

Andrew Bass

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn
Malay Shah

Malay Shah

Founder and CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.