---
title: 'Software Engineer at Petra Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-petra-labs-new-york-2n57yp582g6g'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Software Engineer at Petra Labs

- **Company:** Petra Labs
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-02-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/petra-labs/23a973ba-907c-44ef-9c66-a88247d8d0f6

## Job description

## About Petra Labs

Petra Labs is building the attribution and experimentation layer for AI search. We believe the future of commerce will be shaped by AI-driven information retrieval, yet most companies lack the infrastructure to understand and capitalize on this emerging growth channel. Petra Labs uses large-scale simulations, agentic analysis, and deeply embedded integrations to turn AI search from a black box into a measurable growth channel teams can rigorously optimize and allocate spend against.

Raised $5M+ in funding from Tier-1 VCs. We work in our SoHo, New York office.

Culture

- We hire a small number of extremely talented people and give them as much ownership and autonomy as possible
- We are truth-seeking. Transparent, direct discourse is encouraged. We challenge existing beliefs in pursuit of always getting better
- We work hard and are unapologetic about the level of effort required to build a generational company

## What You’ll Do

- Define and build product end-to-end. Deeply understand user needs to iterate on, deploy, and scale software, with extreme ownership
- Operate at the frontier. We tackle ambiguous, unsolved problems in AI search that require running experiments to uncover novel insights
- Design and build large-scale systems, data models, and infrastructure

You’ll Excel in This Role If You

- Can quickly and effectively decompose large, ambiguous problems and systems
- Have built real products before and are comfortable owning large technical surfaces
- Have strong fundamentals in system design and databases, with good judgment around when to move fast versus build for scale

Process

1. Hiring Manager Screen
2. Technical Interview
3. On-Site Interview

## About Petra Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Petra Labs is an AI search marketing platform and services company that helps enterprises optimize, measure, and manage their brand presence across AI-powered search engines.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: New York City, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Sami Akkawi, Rishi Penmetcha, Ramie Khoury

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Search Marketing / Enterprise Marketing Technology (MarTech)
- **Target customers**: Enterprise B2B, Growth-stage companies, and marketing teams focused on AI search visibility (AEO - AI Engine Optimization)
- **Mission or purpose**: To help enterprises turn AI search into a defensible revenue channel by providing the software, strategy, and execution needed to win in AI-powered discovery.

## Products & Services
- **The Petra Engine (Platform)**: A proprietary AI search marketing platform that provides competitive intelligence, visibility tracking, sentiment analysis, and chain-of-thought data across major AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.). It surfaces real user queries from panel data and custom integrations.
- **Full-Service AEO Team**: A hands-on, end-to-end service layer that executes strategy based on platform insights. Includes owned media (content, technical SEO), earned media (citation placements), social media management, and programmatic AEO.
- **Custom Attribution Modeling (MMM)**: Builds custom Market Mix Models to connect AI search visibility, earned media, and other levers directly to pipeline and closed revenue, solving for the "dark traffic" problem of AI referrals.
- **Strategy & Consulting**: Provides a roadmap reverse-engineered from platform citation data, including prompt mapping, competitive threat analysis, and business intelligence.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding (Seed round); amount not publicly disclosed. Revenue model is service-led with platform licensing.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Growth Signals**:
    - **Headcount**: 10 employees (as of mid-2026), with a monthly growth rate of +33.3% on LinkedIn.
    - **Traffic**: Website traffic growing at +44.9% month-over-month.
    - **Client Results**: Case studies show clients achieving 27x AI search traffic in 6 months and AI referrals becoming 25% of net-new revenue.
    - **Market Position**: First-mover in the "enterprise AEO platform + services" category, competing with traditional SEO agencies and pure-play AI monitoring tools.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack approach**: Combines proprietary data (chain-of-thought, panel data) with a dedicated execution team, unlike pure-software tools or traditional agencies that lack the technology layer.
- **Attribution expertise**: Solves the "dark traffic" problem—AI referrals that show up as direct/organic in standard analytics—by building custom MMMs, making AI search a measurable and defensible budget line.
- **Chain-of-thought data**: Captures the hidden reasoning and interim citations of AI models (sources the model consults but doesn't cite), providing unique competitive intelligence.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Founders and early team have backgrounds from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and top consulting firms, bringing a high level of strategic rigor.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product-led growth**: Building the platform to be the "source of truth" for AI search performance while using the services team to drive adoption and ROI.
- **Category creation**: Establishing "AI Search Team" as a new category alongside SEO and SEM, targeting enterprise CMOs and heads of growth.
- **Attribution as a wedge**: Using proprietary attribution models to prove ROI and lock in long-term enterprise contracts.
- **Scale the team**: Actively hiring for founding engineers, strategy & ops, and growth roles to build the core team.

## Why Work Here
- **Founding team opportunity**: As a 2025 startup, new hires get to shape the product, culture, and strategy from an early stage.
- **High-impact work**: Directly building the infrastructure and playbook for a new category (AEO) that is rapidly growing in importance.
- **Culture & Perks**:
    - **Hybrid/In-Office**: Described as a "Hybrid Workspace" with a strong in-office presence in New York City (likely 3-4 days/week).
    - **Equity**: Roles list "Equity" as a benefit, standard for early-stage startups.
    - **Team**: Small, high-caliber team (10 people) with backgrounds from top-tier firms (McKinsey, AWS, Goldman Sachs).
    - **Role variety**: Engineers and operators will have broad ownership across the stack and business, not siloed.
- **Notable for job seekers**: The company is actively hiring its first few engineers and operators, offering significant upside and influence.

## Sources
1. [petralabs.com](https://www.petralabs.com/)
2. [LinkedIn - Petra Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/petra-labs-ai)
3. [Built In - Petra Labs](https://builtin.com/company/petra-labs)
4. [Petra Labs Solutions Page](https://www.petralabs.com/solutions)
5. [Petra Labs Jobs (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/petra-labs/23a973ba-907c-44ef-9c66-a88247d8d0f6)

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