Product Operations Engineer

NYC, in-person at our West Soho office · Full-time · $100-130K + generous equity package

About koodos labs

koodos labs is a consumer AI research and product company dedicated to ensuring that the internet knows you and can do things for you, on your terms. We are the company behind Shelf, the leading personal context platform used by millions of people to track and understand what they consume. Read about the co-founders and their story here.

You should join koodos labs for the people and our mission.

We aspire to build the best team of the 2020s. Just like PayPal in the 90s, Google in the 00s, and Stripe in the 10s, we want to be known as "a place where it's good to be from." If you join us, we promise to be the best place to grow your career — with the best people you've ever worked with. We’re also working on a very bold mission.

Your mission

Be the operational backbone of the product & engineering team and the connective tissue between Shelf users and the people building it. You'll own the sprint, release, and documentation discipline that keeps the whole team aligned, translate user signal into shipped improvement, ship small fixes yourself when that's the fastest path, and oversee a small support team so that function runs cleanly without pulling you in.

Success here is handling all the operational work required to free up Design on craft. Engineering on shipping. Leadership on strategy. Marketing on growing Shelf. You're the project management in the middle.

This is naturally a highly collaborative and facilitation-oriented role and you will work closely with our Product lead, who you’ll report to, and very cross-functionally.

What you'll do

1. Product operations, sprint, and release discipline

a) Roadmap visualization and maintenance

Own the canonical forward-looking roadmap: what's shipping, what's next, what's parked. Visualize it in a way people actually use. Bring the team together around it, edit continuously as things shift, and make sure eng, design, growth, and brand are all planning against the same picture and that we are constantly working on the highest ROI things.

What great looks like: We are proactive not reactive - we all know what the next problem to solve is. At any moment, anyone on the team can open one artifact and see the next 6-8 weeks clearly. No stale roadmap docs floating around. The roadmap is the conversation-starter in every cross-functional discussion, not an afterthought.

b) Sprint planning and project kick-offs

Run sprint planning in partnership with Product lead, Eng and Design. Make sure what we commit to maps to our stated priorities, that engineering capacity is pointed at the highest-ROI work, and that resource allocation is deliberate. Arrange project kick-offs that start work with a shared understanding of the problem, the scope, and who's doing what by when.

What great looks like: For the next sprint at minimum, every person on the team can answer "what am I working on, why, who else is involved, and when do we sync." No ambiguity on ownership, dates, or dependencies. Engineering time is visibly tied to priorities, not drift.

c) Rituals and decision hygiene

Set up agendas for and facilitate sprint planning, retros, and project kick-offs. Your role is to make sure there is VERY clear decision ownership (often not you) and process, and that it's clear who's doing what by when. Crisp notes, clear action items, follow-through until items close.

What great looks like: Every meeting has a shaped agenda, named decisions to be made, a clear decider on each, and written outcomes within hours. Action items land in Linear with owners and dates.

d) Catching open threads

Scope questions, process debates, half-framed "should we do X" asks that land in Slack and elsewhere. Frame them, get them in front of the right people, and drive them to a decision, a ticket, or a clear owner. Don't let things drift.

What great looks like: Open questions don't go stale in threads. Each one lands as a decision, a ticket, or a clear owner within 24 hours of being surfaced (often much faster

e) Release management

Over time, you’ll manage nightly → staging → prod. You're the release manager. Own pre-launch checklists, QA and testing process, release notes, and cross-functional launch readiness. Ensure that product lead and design have greenlit staging the "nothing ships until X is done" discipline. Act as the bridge between product and marketing/growth so those teams can actually plan around what's going out.

What great looks like: Every release ships with clarity on which PRs are in, with QA signed off, release notes drafted, and growth and brand informed with enough lead time to build their own plans against it.

f) Documentation and knowledge management

Over time, you will own Slack and Notion hygiene. The decision log, the specs index, the retro archive, all current and navigable. Everything is optimized for AI to help turbo-boost us.

Key assets you maintain (with AI support):

UXR.md → a persistent record of highest leverage user needs/issues.

…

What great looks like: Anyone arriving cold to a problem, a teammate or an agent, can orient in under two minutes. Decisions are captured with the context that drove them, in a shape that's readable and machine-retrievable. Six weeks later we can trace why we chose what we chose, and the agents we deploy can pull that same context on demand.

2. Feedback synthesis and actually ship improvements

Translate bug reports, support signals & community feedback into structured Linear input with enough context that tickets can be picked up cold.

Cross-reference user-reported issues with analytics to assess blast radius and prioritization.

Over time, tracking amplitude to continuously learn about user behaviour for the new releases we've shipped to understand what is working well

On an AI-first team, everyone rolls up their sleeves. Over time, we would like for you to also start to ship the straightforward fixes yourself. On an AI-first team we expect you to use the tools to ship what you can directly, rather than routing every small thing into the eng queue and waiting. You own a category of small improvements end-to-end: problem identification, scope, ship, measure.

What great looks like: Small bugs and polish fixes don't pile up in a backlog waiting for eng time. They ship on a steady cadence, with you doing the work. Eng gets to focus on the big stuff. Users see improvements within days, not months.

3. Support operations

Oversee a team of support contractors working in Zendesk. Set priorities, quality standards, and coverage. Make them more effective; don't absorb their queue.

Keep intake, routing, and "what counts as resolved" clean and consistent, and spot automation opportunities that reduce manual load over time.

What you won't do TODAY

You will be expected to grow into these in the future.

Build product roadmaps - you’ll maintain them and make sure they get built

Decide which projects should be prioritized in the sprint vs others - but you’ll set up the scaffolding for the clearest decisions and priorities

Scope product specs - you will facilitate getting the right specs set up

Ideal Candidate

We recognize that the confidence gap and imposter syndrome might discourage amazing candidates from applying. Every job description is a wish list, so please reach out if this role really excites you.

Role-specific traits

Most important: you are a heat seeking missile for pain that actively seeks out the hairiest, gnarliest operational problems, then surgically works to blow them up.

Obsessive about detail. You cannot let a misnamed ticket, a missing action item, or a broken link pass without fixing it. Operational excellence is your baseline, not a stretch. You

Very patient. Startups move fast and plans shift. You're comfortable with messy, changing, contradictory inputs. You'll explain the same thing five ways to five opinionated people without irritation. You assume good intent, and operate from it.

Thrives in the hairy middle, respects ambiguity. A lot of what you'll handle is genuinely unresolved: problems that aren't yet well-defined, decisions that can't cleanly be made yet, handoffs where nobody's quite sure who owns what. You hold that space and can pull in the right people to help you fight through it. You don't force premature resolution on problems that aren't ready for it. At the same time, you're obsessive about locking down what CAN be decided, fast.

Warm, collaborative, low ego. You earn trust by being helpful and reliable, but also by setting boundaries and being clear about operational excellence and accountability. People should always look forward to working with you.

Genuinely energized by operational craft. Sprint hygiene, release coordination, clean documentation, tight feedback loops: you find these satisfying as ends in themselves, not stepping stones.

Skills and experience

Fluency with how software gets built. You know what a clean Linear ticket looks like, what a real QA pass entails, what it means to resource a sprint realistically, and what working with a designer looks like.

Problem-solving instinct. You can analyze recurring issues and propose sustainable solutions, not just route them.

Automation-minded. You ask "how can I automate this?" and act on it, while keeping the experience human and high-touch.

User-centric. You put users first and are genuinely interested in understanding their problems deeply.

AI-assisted technical comfort. Knowledge of full-stack development (esp iOS) and debugging practices, enough to ship small fixes yourself. The more technically competent you are the stronger of a fit.

Strong nice-to-have: over 2 years of dedicated full-stack engineering experience: You have shipped production-ready apps and services, managed the rollout, and maintained them once released. You know what the work that needs to get done for repeatable and reliable releases.

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