LawnStarter
This is a remote role for candidates located in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
About LawnStarter
LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and outdoor services, with over $100M in annual bookings. We're expanding beyond lawn care to become the one-stop shop for all home services — operating across three brands (LawnStarter, Lawn Love, Home Gnome) on a single shared platform.
About Engineering at LawnStarter
We're restructuring engineering around initiative teams: a Product Engineer paired with a PM and a designer, with an Engineering Manager who covers a couple of initiatives and supports your growth. The engineer leads AI agents like a team, ships the work, and is accountable — with the rest of the triangle — for whether the initiative moves its metric.
We're betting that 1–2 strong engineers running AI agents can outship the labor-team model that defined the last decade of software. That bet only works if the engineers we hire are wired for ownership and can ship to a marketplace with real customers and pros on both sides.
The Role
You're the engineering anchor of one initiative at a time. The initiative is a team effort — an iron triangle of you, your PM, and your designer — and you have key participation across the full lifecycle: shaping the problem, deciding the technical approach, leading the AI agents that implement most of the code, shipping to production, and answering for the outcome alongside the rest of the triangle.
You're accountable for the outcome — not for the volume of code merged. If an agent can ship it safely, your job is to make sure the agent does it right and the metric moves. If the initiative needs hand-written code in a sensitive area, you write it yourself.
What makes this role different:
What You'll Own
Problems to Solve
Leading AI agents at staff-level quality
Most of the code on your initiative will be authored by AI agents. The work is making agents ship as if a senior engineer wrote it: prompts that encode our codebase conventions, evals that catch hallucinations before merge, tests that exercise the edges, observability that catches the regression in production before a customer reports it. How do you build the agent workflow that lets one engineer ship what used to take a team?
Owning an outcome without a tech lead
You don't have a tech lead to approve your design or an architect to escalate to. You have an EM who covers a couple of initiatives and peers on adjacent ones. How do you make calls fast, document them clearly, and stay accountable to the outcome — without slowing down for hierarchy that no longer exists?
Shipping outcomes, not features
The initiative will be measured by a metric — a conversion rate, a retention curve, a pro-funnel KPI, a unit economics shift. You're accountable for the number, not the feature. How do you scope to actually move it, decide what to not build, and have the discipline to follow up 2–4 weeks after launch even when the next initiative is calling?
What Success Looks Like (Year 1)
Who You Are
AI-native. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent are how you ship — daily, on production work. You have opinions about prompts, evals, agent loops, MCP servers, and review workflows, and you know when to let the agent run vs. write it yourself. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you describe AI coding as "something you're exploring" or prefer to write everything by hand.
Already operating at lead level. You may currently be titled Senior, Staff, Lead, or Principal — but in practice you've been the person making the call, shipping the hard thing, and answering for whether it worked. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you've always had a tech lead breaking down the work for you.
Outcome-driven, not output-driven. You measure your week in "did the metric move" and "did the experience get better," not in tickets closed. You read the post-launch dashboard and you own the answer. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you take pride in volume of code shipped or feel uncomfortable being measured on a number you don't fully control.
A strong horizontal partner. You hold your own with a strong PM and a strong designer. You bring engineering judgment to product calls and product judgment to engineering calls. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you hide behind "that's product's decision" or default to RICE-scoring tickets handed down to you.
Decisive and documented. Architecture decisions, data-model choices, rollout plans — you write them down, get fast input, and move. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you wait for consensus on questions that have a clear right answer, or if you make calls and never write them down.
Raises the floor, not just the ceiling. Your impact compounds beyond your own initiative because you leave artifacts — agent workflows, evals, runbooks, post-launch reviews. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you're a lone wolf who ships brilliantly but leaves nothing reusable behind.
Cares about customers and pros. This is a real-world marketplace with real people on both sides. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you're chasing pure engineering elegance over business and customer outcomes.
This Role Is NOT
Tech You'll Touch
You don't need every box checked. You need deep skill in at least one of our stacks plus credible production experience with AI coding agents.
Benefits