Founding AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer

Confidential Early-Stage AI Startup | On-site — San Francisco, CA Compensation: $165,000 – $210,000 + 0.75% – 2% equity Location: 5 days/week on-site, San Francisco Visa Sponsorship: Available for exceptional candidates (transfers only)

About Us

We're a small, well-funded (seed-stage) AI startup building multimodal AI agents that review architectural blueprints for building code compliance, safety, and buildability. Our mission is directly tied to solving the housing crisis: when our agents work, buildings and apartments get approved and built dramatically faster.

Our founding team has a track record of changing real housing policy in the Bay Area, and we're now applying that same energy to AI. We're a tiny team (currently 3 people) at the earliest stages of building — this is a true 0-to-1 founding opportunity with outsized ownership and impact.

The Role

As a Founding AI Engineer, you'll work directly with our CEO to build and ship the core AI systems behind our product. You'll have significant autonomy over your own research roadmap while working at startup speed.

What You'll Do

• Generate hypotheses and run time-boxed experiments on multimodal AI agents
• Work on supervised fine-tuning, model distillation, and auto-research pipelines
• Build retrieval systems and context engineering for document/blueprint understanding
• Design and run computer vision evals and internal tooling
• Talk to users and dogfood the product on a weekly basis
• Manage your own research roadmap with high autonomy in a fast-moving, unstructured environment

Who We're Looking For

We're hiring for two overlapping profiles — you don't need to check every box:

• Profile A: A software engineer transitioning into ML/AI who is comfortable designing and running experiments
• Profile B: An ML engineer who can ship fast, functional prototypes

Must-Have Qualifications

• 2–8 years of experience in software engineering or machine learning (exceptional new grads will be considered)
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field from a strong university
• Demonstrated experience building or optimizing AI/ML systems
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools is required (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) — this is not optional
• Experience designing and executing ML evals/experiments
• Genuine, authentic interest in housing, construction, urban planning, or urbanism — this matters to us and is part of how we evaluate fit
• Comfortable working 5 days on-site in San Francisco

Nice to Have

• Background in computer vision or multimodal AI (document/image understanding)
• Experience in high-stakes/regulated AI domains (autonomous vehicles, healthcare, legal, construction tech)
• Experience at an early-stage startup (Seed–Series B)

This Role Is Not a Fit If You:

• Have a history of short tenures (~1 year average) — this is a founding role requiring real commitment
• Don't currently use AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow
• Aren't genuinely interested in the housing/construction/urbanism mission
• Prefer heavy structure, defined processes, or close direction rather than high autonomy

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $165,000 – $210,000
• Equity: 0.75% – 2% (meaningful founding-level ownership)
• Benefits: Full health coverage + HSA, lunch and dinner provided, 401(k)
• Visa: Sponsorship/transfers available for exceptional candidates

Hiring Process

• Intro Call (30 min) — Conversation about mission fit and startup readiness
• Technical & Culture Interview (90 min) — Build a prototype for a slice of the product; use of AI coding tools encouraged
• Paid Work Trial (3 days, paid) — Run evals on our multimodal agent, generate and test experiment hypotheses, and analyze results (typically scheduled over a weekend)

We are an early-stage, mission-driven team looking for someone who wants to help solve the housing crisis through AI. If that resonates with you, we'd love to hear from you.

Pay: $165,000.00 - $210,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Health insurance

Work Location: In person