Software Engineer, Product

About Rebar

Rebar is building the AI operating system for commercial HVAC, Electrical, and Plumbing.

Over the past year our quoting platform has processed tens of thousands of projects across North America and we’re continuing that growth. Our customers include many of the top firms in the industry. Some of these companies are running billion dollar construction projects on workflows that still look like it's 1985.

Construction is 10% of GDP and still massively underserved by software. We are changing that.

We raised a $14M Series A from leading construction tech investors and are entering our next phase of growth. We are building a set of AI native products that will define how this industry operates.

About the Engineering Org

The role of the engineer is rapidly changing. We're aware and we're being very intentional of ensuring we adapt with it. We are fostering an engineering culture of growth and development. We strongly emphasize care of craft and winning together. Our core values are:

• Everyone operates like an owner

• Find a way

• We win together

That being said the whole company still works really hard! This is something that you should read and internalize. This might not be the place for everyone.

About the Role

We're looking for a Software Engineer focused on our product. This hire will own the engineering behind key product expansion, a quickly rising quality bar, and the architecture of the application our customers live in all day.

Our product engineers are full stack with a slight frontend skew. While numerous difficult customer workflows and interactions sit in the client, you'll still ship and own features end to end. You should be comfortable in DBeaver with Postgres or digging into the React profiler.

Our product is a browser-based (konva) canvas editor on top of extremely dense construction drawings. Estimators open a planset with thousands of pages, our models mark it up, and multiple people edit the same document at the same time. That means the hard problems here are not CRUD screens. They are rendering performance on enormous documents, correctness in a collaborative document, and state that has to survive a flaky jobsite network.

This is a scale moment for us. We are expanding both vertically up our market as well as branching into new markets like hydronics and plumbing. We need an experienced and technically strong engineer to help us accomplish that.

I cannot state this enough - I will personally ensure that you leave as a better and more experienced engineer than when you joined. You will get to set the technical standard for a product org as it roughly doubles over the next year, own a genuinely hard piece of client-side engineering, and watch it scale fr om hundreds of companies to thousands.

Responsibilities

• Own runtime quality of the product

  • Interaction latency, rendering performance, memory, and correctness on real customer projects - not lab conditions. You own the metrics, the budgets, and the regressions.

• Own the hard client-side architecture

  • The canvas editor, the collaborative document layer, and the state that ties them together.

• Help set a strong engineering standard in the agentic world

  • Help continue to raise the quality bar for the engineering org

• Raise the review and testing bar

  • Required checks, meaningful end-to-end coverage of the flows that actually break, and review that catches design problems rather than typos.

• Ship features end to end

  • From the editor down through the API and the database. You design the data model and the endpoints your feature needs rather than waiting on someone else to build them.

What We’re Looking For

At a high level, we want technical depth plus the taste to know what not to build. You should actually give a shit about how the product feels under a user's hands.

You should be able to walk me through the last time you took a slow, heavy interface and made it fast - what you profiled, what you measured, what you shipped, and what you deliberately left alone. You should have opinions about testing that come from having been burned. In addition, we’re asking for comfort across the whole stack, so that you’re excited and eager to jump into our collaboration engine and understand data flow end to end.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production web applications, with significant time in a large, long-lived codebase

• Deep React and TypeScript - you know how rendering actually works and you can reason about it without guessing

• Real browser performance work: profiling, interaction latency, memory, rendering

• Has owned complex client-side state in production - not just fetch and render

• Solid backend fundamentals: you've designed APIs and relational data models, written migrations, and run server-side code in production (we're Python and Postgres on AWS and GCP)

• Comfortable owning a domain end to end, including the production incidents in it

Nice to Have

• Canvas or WebGL rendering at scale (Konva, Pixi, Three, custom) - we're on Konva today and evaluating a move

• Real-time collaboration and CRDTs (Yjs, Automerge, ShareDB), and the failure modes that come with them

• Offline and unreliable-network handling: IndexedDB, local persistence, reconnect and conflict behavior

• Backend depth beyond CRUD: Postgres query and schema performance, durable async workflows (we use Temporal), or the server side of a real-time system

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary: Competitive base salary

• Equity: Meaningful equity package, commensurate with experience

• Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage

• Perks:

  • agentic tooling budget

  • lunches provided, dinners provided (after a set time)

  • great culture and office banter

This is a salaried, onsite role located in New York City's Flatiron district. We are still a startup! We love working onsite together and believe strongly that this gives us creative problem-solving, and building strong connections.