Lead Product Engineer

What you'll ship

Working product every Pulse cycle. Not slide decks. Not status updates. Not prototypes someone else must “productionize” later. You operate inside a swarm of 3-4 senior consultants plus AI agents inside Amplify, shipping production code in 5-day cycles against a live backlog.

How we build

Critical Propulsion pairs senior consultants with AI agents inside Amplify, our agentic delivery framework, to build products in 5-day Pulse cycles. Consultants own the judgment: what to build, what ships, which gate a release must clear. Agents handle the volume: code generation, testing, the repeatable work a team of ten used to grind through.

Some engagements close out at delivery. Others keep going, the swarm shipping against a live roadmap cycle after cycle. Either way, week 1 is working product, not onboarding.

What we expect

• You write clean, working software and you're comfortable across the stack. Depth in one area is fine. You can't freeze when the work crosses a boundary.
• You pair effectively with AI agents inside Amplify. You know when to trust their output and when to override it. When overrides occur, you bring feedback for improvement to integrate into the Amplify framework.
• You embrace agentic development. You don't treat AI as autocomplete. You delegate real work to agents, review their output critically, and iterate fast. This is how you build product now, not a novelty bolted onto the old way.
• You don't wait to be assigned tasks. You see what the product needs, pick up the work, and close it.
• You set technical direction within the swarm. Other consultants look to you when the path forward isn't obvious.
• You communicate directly. Blocked? Say so in minutes, not hours or days.
• You operate autonomously. No status meetings that could be a message. No decks that could be a decision.

Nice to have

• Experience with React, modern frontend frameworks, or full-stack TypeScript and Microsoft technologies such as .NET Core and C#. Bonus if you've built component systems or design-system-driven UIs.
• Familiarity with Azure cloud services, Python, or Node.js in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI tooling: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot Workspace, or similar. Better still if you've built instructions, skills and plugins where agents handle real work, not just code completion.
• Experience building or consuming AI APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent) in production, not just prototypes.
• You’ve moved past vibe coding and long session context windows, and moved into building and controlling loops.
• Comfort with spec-driven design. You've worked from a detailed spec to build something that matches intent on the first pass.
• Experience shipping a product feature and watching real usage tell you whether you got it right, not just whether it passed review.
• Prior experience on small, autonomous teams. Closer to a 3-4 person crew than a 15-person feature factory.

What we don't filter on

• Years of experience as a number. If you can demonstrate judgement and lead a swarm through a 5-day Pulse cycle and ship working product, the number on your resume is less relevant.
• Specific languages, frameworks, or certifications as leading your credentials. We care about engineering judgment, not keyword matches.
• Demonstrated ability to build, ship, and bring others along supercedes school or company name.

What you get

• A team where everyone builds. No layers of management between you and the work.
• AI agents as real teammates inside Amplify. They change how much one person can ship.
• Pulse cycles that create rhythm without sprint overhead (KT +75%, Rework +60%, Mgmt +45% in typical sprint models).
• Product impact you can see. Your work ships in days, not quarters, and the roadmap shows what happened next.
• Competitive comp

How to apply

Send us your resume and something that shows how you think and what you build. A repo, a side project, a PR you're proud of. Skip the cover letter unless you actually want to write one.

Let's have a real conversation.