Product Engineers
The frontend/backend divide is fading. Product Engineers work backwards from user experience to technology, shipping iteratively and staying close to customers.
The traditional split between frontend and backend engineers is collapsing. Frontend developers now build full applications with databases and auth. Backend developers face pressure to write UI code or shift toward infrastructure. AI tools accelerate this convergence by letting developers focus less on syntax and more on product.
What Product Engineers Do
Product Engineers work backwards from the desired product experience to the technologies that enable it. They think holistically across frontend, backend, design, and user experience rather than staying in a single lane.
Three traits define them:
Iterative — Ship fast, gather feedback, improve. Perfection comes through cycles, not upfront planning.
Customer-focused — Talk directly to users. Let their problems shape solutions rather than building features in isolation.
Pragmatic — Technology serves the product, not the other way around. Pick tools that solve problems, not tools that seem impressive.
Product vs Platform Engineers
Platform Engineers build infrastructure that empowers Product Engineers. They create the foundations—CI/CD pipelines, developer tools, internal platforms—so Product Engineers can focus on user-facing features without reinventing plumbing.
Finding Product Engineers
Look for candidates who care deeply about quality experiences and stay curious about new ideas. Strong fundamentals matter: accessibility, CSS, HTML, JavaScript. But the real signal is whether they think about edge cases—slow connections, API failures, confused users—before those problems ship to production.