Founding AI Engineer

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Department: Direct Placement/Contract to Hire

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

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.

 #LI-DNI

Benefits

Salary: $160K–$200K Base
Equity: 0.5%–2%

Employment Type: Full-Time
Visa Sponsorship: None Available