How to apply for AI Product Engineer

About Crux Climate

Crux Climate is building the infrastructure to streamline sustainable finance, specifically by making tax credit transactions efficient and interconnected to accelerate clean energy projects. As a mission-driven startup at the intersection of climate tech and fintech, they offer the chance to work on high-impact problems with a direct line to the clean energy transition. The team is small, fast-paced, and focused on reimagining how clean energy projects get financed.

About the role

As an AI Product Engineer, you'll be a founding-like engineer building AI products from 0 to 1, working directly with customers to understand their pain points and co-designing systems that ship high-quality LLM-powered features. You'll collaborate closely with product, commercial, and legal teams to reimagine clean energy finance transactions, and you'll have the autonomy to choose the tools and frameworks that define the engineering culture. This role is pivotal in turning complex, manual workflows into intelligent, scalable products.

A typical day

You might start your day with a customer call to understand their pain points in tax credit transactions, then collaborate with the product team to prototype an LLM-powered feature that automates document review. In the afternoon, you'll pair with a legal expert to refine the AI's output, push code to production, and iterate based on user feedback. Expect a mix of hands-on coding, cross-functional meetings, and rapid experimentation.

Who Crux Climate is looking for

• 4+ years of full-stack experience with a strong portfolio of end-to-end product builds (frontend + backend), ideally in fast-moving startup environments.
• Proven track record of shipping user-facing LLM products, with hands-on experience integrating models like GPT-4 into production applications.
• Excellent communicator who can translate customer conversations into technical requirements and work cross-functionally with commercial and legal teams.
• Bonus: Fluency in Next.js, React, and TypeScript, with a keen eye for UX and experience using evals and CI/CD to iterate on AI features.

Tips for this application

• Highlight specific LLM products you've shipped—include metrics like user adoption, latency improvements, or cost savings to demonstrate impact.
• Showcase full-stack projects where you owned both frontend and backend, especially those involving real-time data or complex workflows.
• Demonstrate interest in climate finance or sustainable energy by referencing specific challenges in tax credit transactions or clean energy project financing.
• Emphasize your ability to work directly with customers: mention times you've conducted user interviews, gathered feedback, and translated it into product features.
• If you have experience with Next.js, React, and TypeScript, make it prominent—this is their preferred stack and a bonus they explicitly value.

What to cover in your cover letter

['Your experience building 0→1 AI products, especially LLM-based, and how you navigated ambiguity to ship quickly.', 'Concrete examples of cross-functional collaboration with non-technical teams (product, legal, commercial) to deliver technical solutions.', 'Your motivation for joining a climate-focused fintech and how you can contribute to streamlining sustainable finance.', 'Your technical stack alignment (Next.js, React, TypeScript) and any UX decision-making experience that shows you can own product outcomes.']

Research before applying

• Understand the basics of clean energy tax credits (e.g., ITC, PTC) and the current inefficiencies in tax equity transactions.
• Explore Crux Climate's website, blog, and any press releases to learn about their product vision and recent milestones.
• Research competitors or adjacent players in sustainable finance and AI for climate to understand the landscape.
• Look up the backgrounds of the founding team and employees on LinkedIn to get a sense of the company culture and technical challenges.

Likely interview topics

Based on the job description, expect questions about:

• Walk us through an LLM product you built from scratch—what was the problem, how did you design the solution, and what was the impact?
• How do you approach evaluating and iterating on AI features? Describe your experience with evals and CI/CD for LLM products.
• Tell us about a time you worked directly with customers to understand their needs and translated that into a product feature.
• How would you reimagine a manual, document-heavy process in clean energy finance using AI? What would your first prototype look like?
• Describe your experience with Next.js, React, and TypeScript. How do you make UX decisions when building user-facing tools?

Common mistakes to avoid

• Submitting a generic resume that doesn't highlight LLM product experience or full-stack ownership—this role requires proven AI shipping.
• Ignoring the climate finance domain: showing no interest or curiosity about the problem space suggests you're not mission-aligned.
• Overemphasizing theoretical AI research without practical product-building examples—they want builders, not researchers.