Founding AI Engineer
Job Summary
We are seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join a mission-driven team that is automating architecture to help solve the housing crisis. In this high-impact role, you will operate at the frontier of agentic AI for the built world, running high-autonomy experiments to advance multimodal agents that evaluate blueprints for building code compliance.
Your contributions will directly accelerate the pace at which apartments and housing can be built across the country. This is a rare opportunity to shape the direction of applied AI research and product development at a seed-stage startup while working closely with users.
Essential Functions
- Generate hypotheses and run time-boxed experiments to improve the accuracy of multimodal AI agents
- Reflect on experiment results and update mental models to direct your own research roadmap
- Work on supervised fine-tuning, model distillation, auto-research, retrieval tasks, and context engineering
- Run computer vision evals and build internal tooling to accelerate experimentation
- Talk to users and dogfood the product on a weekly basis
Required Qualifications
- 2+ years in software engineering or machine learning with a focus on AI and LLM applications
- Highly autonomous and self-directed, able to manage your own workload and generate experiments independently
- Daily usage of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or similar
- Ability to blend software engineering speed with machine learning rigor
- Must be able to work in-person 5 days per week in San Francisco
- Strong alignment with the mission of solving the housing crisis
Technical Skills
- Python
- Multimodal LLMs
- Computer Vision
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- AI Agents
- Evals Frameworks
- Supervised Fine-Tuning
- Model Distillation
- Context Engineering
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary range of $165,000 to $210,000 plus meaningful equity in a seed-stage company. Benefits include health coverage, flexible time off, and the opportunity to work on technology that has direct societal impact.