Founding AI Engineer

Job description

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