Since around 2024, we have seen more companies hiring product engineers into smaller, leaner product and engineering teams. The expectation is often broader than it would have been in a more traditional software engineering role. Employers want people who can build well, understand the customer problem and make sensible decisions about what is worth building.
AI is accelerating that change. In our conversation with Bruce Pannaman of 9fin, he described work that once took two engineers two weeks being completed by one engineer in a day or two. As development gets faster, product judgement becomes more important. The question is not only whether someone can ship a feature, but whether they can work out which feature should exist in the first place.
We are also seeing the title used more widely. Some companies are hiring Senior Product Engineers, Staff Product Engineers and Founding Product Engineers, while others are looking for the same mix of skills under Software Engineer or Full Stack Engineer. AI Product Engineer is becoming more common too, particularly where the role involves building AI-native products around large language models.
Technical requirements are changing alongside the title. Some clients are less fixed on one framework or backend technology than they were a few years ago. A strong React engineer may be considered for a Vue role, or someone working in Laravel may move into another backend stack, provided they have the right engineering fundamentals and product experience.
That flexibility can widen the search, but the harder part is still identifying genuine product ownership. Plenty of software engineers can talk about product thinking. Fewer can show where they challenged a requirement, changed direction after user feedback or made a trade-off between technical quality, speed and customer value.
For employers, that is often where the difference between a strong software engineer and the right product engineer becomes clear.
