Staff Software Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $220K – $280K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Pulley

Pulley helps the country’s top architects, builders, and retailers speed up every project in their portfolio. With AI-powered permitting intelligence and expert guidance, we eliminate costly delays and bring predictability across the full lifecycle of commercial projects.

Today, permitting is the slowest, most uncertain part of building, spread across 19,000+ jurisdictions with different rules, timelines, and surprises. Pulley gives project teams the clarity and predictability they need to move from planning to opening without delays.

We support rollout programs for brands like J.Crew, Solidcore, and Hibbett Sports, as well as major data center buildouts, EV charging networks, and other commercial projects. Our platform dramatically reduces approval timelines, improves forecasting accuracy, and removes thousands of hours of manual work from design and construction teams.

Founded in 2021, Pulley combines deep permitting expertise with purpose-built AI from people who have created products used by millions. We’re backed by CRV, Susa Ventures, Fifth Wall, and leaders from Plaid, Segment, ServiceTitan, and Procore.

What You'll Do

In this role, you will build the product that gets stuff built. You'll work closely with engineers, designers, and end-users to accelerate our product development. As a staff-level software engineer at Pulley, you will:

• Own problem areas, not just features—define the technical direction for a domain spanning multiple product surfaces, and carry it from ambiguity through architecture to shipped, iterated-on product

• Turn unstructured permitting documents, city regulations, and jurisdiction workflows into fast, reliable product experiences, with AI at the core of how the product works

• Build with AI agents as a daily practice—directing, reviewing, and shipping agent-driven work at high velocity while owning the quality bar

• Make the technical bets that determine what Pulley can build next year, not just this quarter—and own the consequences of those bets in production

• Multiply the engineers around you: set technical direction others build within, mentor senior engineers toward larger scope, and make the whole team faster through the systems, standards, and abstractions you create

Who You Are

• You thrive in ambiguity—you'd rather define the right problem than execute a spec, and you're energized rather than paralyzed when the path isn't laid out

• You're product-minded: you care whether the thing you built actually solved the customer's problem, and you'll talk to users to find out

• You have strong opinions about quality and velocity and don't treat them as a tradeoff — you look for the tools, abstractions, and processes that buy both

• You default to ownership at organizational scale: when something is broken or missing—a system, a process, a gap between teams—your instinct is to fix it, and you don't need permission or a mandate to start

Need to have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience

• Track record of owning a significant technical domain end-to-end: from "this is somebody's problem" through architecture, delivery, and production ownership, including the unglamorous parts

• Fluency in modern full-stack development—we use TypeScript, React, and Google Cloud; you don't need our exact stack, but you should be productive with something similar

• Real experience building with AI coding agents and LLM-powered features—not just autocomplete; you've shipped work where agents did substantial implementation under your direction

• Ability to architect durable systems while making pragmatic tradeoffs

• Experience mentoring engineers or setting technical direction that other engineers built within

• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and willing to work in person 4 days a week

Nice to haves

• Experience in construction tech, govtech, proptech, or another domain where the hard part is messy real-world documents and processes

• Experience designing evals or otherwise making LLM-powered features reliable in production

• Experience as the most senior engineer in a domain—being the person others escalated to when nobody knew the answer

• Startup experience at the stage where you helped build the team, not just the product