Are you ready to be a remote fractional Product Engineer? You should!

Sergio Pereira -

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I wrote my playbook to find and land jobs at remote startups, after having worked as a Remote CTO myself for 10 years, and having hired over 1000 remote workers, I've learned a few things.

In fact, if you want to dive deeper into other materials I've produced with my knowledge to help job seekers:

• Remote Jobs Braintrust - My private community, with recorded sessions to help remote workers, both by me and by community members who landed remote jobs. It became my go-to place to post new opportunities at my teams and beyond.

• Jobs Copilot AI - I built these AI agents that scrape 400k career pages, find new jobs for you and apply on your behalf. This is for remote and non-remote jobs. Give it a try.

 

Today I'm telling you about the growth of the Product Engineer profile, as I wrote in my predictions for 2025. As Gergely Orosz called out, job descriptions in tech startups are converging into two main categories:

• Product Engineers

• AI Engineers

I'd even say more. This is happening, even for roles whose job title isn't exactly "Product Engineer" and "AI Engineer". It's more and more of a standard expectation of any Software Engineer to have a "product sense".

So, you may ask:

• "What's a product sense?"

In my view, myself and other CTOs, Founders, etc are looking for Software Engineers who:

• Can push working code to a repo and enable some product feature (this used to be almost 100% of the JD)

• Can understand the product, the use case, and key industry nuances (this used to be more of a Product Manager's territory)

• Can contribute with scope, architecture, process ideas (a merge of both previous bullets, it used to be a Tech Manager/Lead doing only this)

It's definitely an increasing requirement in tech. In some cases companies actually call this a Product Engineer and include all these expectations in the JD (like Stacks, which Gergely pointed out). Other times companies keep more tech-focused JDs with more common titles, but they end up hiring a product engineer type profile, because even when they don't plan for that they receive such a big number of applications that they can afford to select a candidate who ticks all those boxes.

As Software Engineers, we really have only 2 options:

• Keep focusing only on writing code and compete against AI tools (uphill battle since that's what these tools are best at).

• Expand our focus towards product, process, etc and adopt a Product Engineer positioning in the market, there will be plenty of opportunity.

The main factor that lead to this expectation change about the Software Engineer role was the growth of AI tools, and how they are making software engineers more efficient. This means a Software Engineer can complete a given work item in a fraction of the time.

So, what to do with the remaining time? If a Software Engineer completes a week's work in a day, what to do with the rest of the days?

There two things happening:

• Teams are getting smaller and Software Engineers are being given bigger scopes of work. Bigger means in many cases towards scope definition, architecture, etc (the "product sense").

• Many companies are hiring Software Engineers  on a Fractional basis, instead of full timers. These are essentially Product Engineers, using AI tools like Cursor, and who have relevant industry/product knowledge.

As such, I think we'll see huge growth of this Remote Fractional Product Engineer type of career. I've been hiring this profile a lot myself (even since before I saw these terms coined together), and I can tell very strong teams can be built this way.

 

In case you're looking for a remote role right now, these are the open roles in my teams, all fully remote:

Opportunities to work with me

• React Native + React Engineer - To build both hybrid mobile apps and web interfaces. Fractional for now, with longer term possibility to go full time.

• Backend Engineer (Python + AWS) - To build the whole backend of the app from scratch. Fractional for now, with longer term possibility to go full time.

• AI Engineer - Mostly Python, with experience building AI agents and genAI-enabled features. I have more than one such opportunity, both fractional and project based (at least for now).

• Fintech "AI Architect" - I'm working with a bank to automate their processes with AI agents. I need an AI Engineer type profile but with Fintech experience and some experience in more "traditional" non-startup contexts. Fractional.

If you're interested in any of these roles, simply drop me your CV/linkedin and a quick intro paragraph, as a reply to this newsletter email (or a DM on X/Linkedin). 

 

These are just a few remote opportunities, there's thousands more out there in remote startups. Only this week I saw 160k+ new jobs being ingested at Jobs Copilot, at least 55k of those are remote jobs.

This is how the JobsCopilot works:

1/ Your auto-application profile

Once you switch to the Premium plan, you'll be prompted to fill in a profile section with your replies to common demographic questions found in job application forms:

2/ Your auto-apply flow

Besides that initial setup, you'll now find this new button in the jobs card. Just click the "Auto Apply" button on the jobs that are relevant to you, and that will trigger the auto-apply backend flow (no application is sent before your final revision):

3/ Application form is fetched and pre-filled for you

All jobs you've ticked "Auto Apply" are moved to the "Jobs to Apply" tab. And for each of them our backend pulls the application form, and our AI generates replies to each of the form questions based on the job description and your profile. Within a couple minutes you can find the pre-filled job application form in each job card:

4/ One-click confirmation

For now, I'm requiring you to review and click this submit button for every job, as I want you to feel in control of your applications, and I want to capture feedback on quality of this flow. I might make it more automated upon some configs in the future.

Once you submit a job for Auto Apply, the copilot will submit your application in the following minutes/hours (depending on work load). You'll get these messages on your email on a frequent basis, like I'm receiving on a daily basis:

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too. 

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira, 
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover