Founding AI Engineer

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