San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-Time
We're seeking a highly autonomous Founding AI Engineer to join a seed-stage agentic AI company applying multimodal AI to construction and architecture. Its agents analyze blueprints to determine whether buildings are safe, buildable, and compliant with regulations such as ADA, Wildland-Urban Interface, structural, and fire-safety requirements.
This is a highly autonomous founding engineering role focused primarily on improving the accuracy of multimodal agents.
The core workflow is:
HYPOTHESIS → EXPERIMENT → IMPLEMENT → EVALUATE → ANALYZE → ITERATE
Most of the engineer's time will be spent designing and running experiments against the evaluation framework rather than interacting with customers. The role can fit either a strong software engineer moving into AI research or an established AI/ML engineer who is also a fast builder.
What You'll Own:
- Multimodal-agent accuracy
- AI evaluation frameworks
- Autoresearch
- Experimental feature development
- Experiment sweeps
- Computer-vision experimentation
- Evaluation analysis
- Lightweight data engineering
- Internal tooling
- Occasional web application improvements
- Building-code domain knowledge
- Product dogfooding
- Limited weekly user interaction
Requirements
- 3+ years professional experience
- Extremely independent and self-directed
- Able to unblock themselves without constant guidance
- High-velocity prototyping and shipping
- Strong software engineering or AI/ML engineering background
- Rigorous understanding of evaluation/evals
- Strong experimental/research instincts
- Able to generate hypotheses rather than simply implement assigned ideas
- Comfortable working across different technical areas
- Genuine alignment with our mission around housing
- Able to work in-person in San Francisco, CA
What We're Looking For:
- Autonomous vehicle experience, particularly Waymo or Zoox
- Multimodal AI
- Computer vision
- AI evaluation/evals
- Research engineering
- Highly regulated AI applications
- Medical/healthcare AI
- Legal AI
- Climate-tech startup experience
- Early-stage startup engineering
- Strong academic background
- Evidence of independently identifying and solving difficult technical problems
- Experience where incorrect model outputs have serious consequences
- Genuine interest in housing, architecture, construction, or policy
Nice-to-Haves:
- Self-driving/autonomous vehicle background
- Highly regulated application-layer AI
- Climate tech
- Computer vision
- Strong academic credentials
- Policy/regulatory curiosity
- Experience interpreting complex technical documents or diagrams
Benefits
Salary: $160K-$200K Base
Equity: 0.5%-2%
Employment Type: Full-Time
Visa Sponsorship: None Available