Software Engineering

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco, Boulder, or Austin

Employment Type: FullTime

Introduction

Foundation is hiring great engineers to accelerate our core business, modernize homebuilding, and transform the experience of buying, selling, and owning homes.

About Foundation

Backed by $6.8M in funding from leading VCs (including Y Combinator), Foundation is an ex-Opendoor team transforming residential real estate.

Foundation’s first product is the native customer experience platform for homebuilders — think “Shopify for Homebuilders.” We work with enterprise-scale homebuilders to deliver a modern digital customer experience, dramatically improving both their customer satisfaction and the productivity of their teams. In two years, we’ve demonstrated clear product-market fit and rapid growth — all with just contract design support.

We’re still in the first of three overlapping phases of growth and company-building:

1. Transformative, AI-driven vertical SaaS for homebuilding — a public-scale opportunity in its own right.

2. The enterprise ecosystem for real estate. Homebuilders are the economic engine that starts this flywheel, unlocking an order-of-magnitude larger opportunity. This ecosystem fosters collaboration between adjacent trillion-dollar industries — lending, title, home insurance, home services, retail, and more.

3. The AI-native home operating system and interface. The economic engine of vertical SaaS and the network effects of the enterprise ecosystem fund and fuel the flywheel that enables us to (profitably) deliver the transformative consumer AI experience for homebuyers and homeowners. Find, buy, and operate your home — all with Foundation.

The Job

You’ll help us build the most trusted, modern customer experience platform in homebuilding — and drag the everyday workflows of a huge, traditional industry into the AI era (with taste, pragmatism, and real-world empathy).

This role sits close to product and customers. You’ll ship across the stack, partner with design and go-to-market, and take ownership of meaningful slices of the platform — from early discovery to production hardening. We’re building for real businesses, real revenue, and real users who don’t have time for fragile tools.

What you’ll do (examples, not a checklist):

• Ship product that matters. Build features that improve how builders operate and how buyers experience the home buying journey — fast feedback, frequent releases, and measurable outcomes.
  

• Own problems end-to-end. Take ambiguous, high-impact problems from “what should we do?” to “it’s live, monitored, and loved.”
  

• Build calm, composable systems. Create software that’s easy to understand, extend, and operate — the kind of codebase that makes other engineers better.
  

• Bring AI into real workflows. Use AI where it genuinely helps users (and avoid it where it doesn’t), turning enterprise “forms and friction” into guided, intelligent experiences.
  

• Work close to customers. Learn how builders think, observe where their tools break down, and build solutions that feel obvious in hindsight.
  

• Raise the bar. Improve quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience through thoughtful refactors, better primitives, and good defaults.
  

The Requirements

We care about craft, curiosity, and follow-through. We’re looking for builders — the kind of engineers who ship, learn, and iterate, with a strong sense of ownership and a bias toward clarity.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, shipping production software that real users rely on.
  

• Product-minded builder. You care about the “why,” not just the “what,” and you optimize for customer outcomes over internal elegance.
  

• Strong fundamentals + good taste. You write clear, maintainable code, choose sensible abstractions, and know when to keep it simple.
  

• Self-directed and accountable. You can take a goal and run with it — breaking it down, communicating tradeoffs, and delivering without constant oversight.
  

• Comfort with ambiguity. You enjoy the early-days energy: vague problems, fast iteration, and learning by building.
  

• Pragmatic about AI. You’re excited about what’s possible, thoughtful about what’s safe and useful, and eager to apply AI in ways that actually improve workflows.
  

• Collaborative communicator. You work well with designers, PMs, and non-engineers — you can explain, listen, and align.
  

• Quality and reliability mindset. You test appropriately, you care about observability, and you leave systems better than you found them.

  
  

Nice-to-haves (not required)

• Experience in SaaS, workflow products, marketplaces, or enterprise-facing systems
  

• Experience modernizing legacy systems without breaking customers
  

• Familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, permissions/security, and data modeling
  

• A track record of building internal tools that make teams dramatically more effective