Founding AI Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage construction-tech AI startup, where you'll build the core intelligence layer that transforms messy construction documents — blueprints, permits, and more — into actionable cost and workflow insights. Your work will directly shape systems that make housing, hospitals, and schools faster and cheaper to build.

What You'll Do

• Apply state-of-the-art computer vision, LLM, and multimodal AI techniques to real-world construction documents.

• Own the intelligence layer — modeling, data pipelines, and inference — rather than application UI.

• Rapidly prototype models and iterate based on user feedback and live data.

• Build and deploy production AI systems that handle noisy, heterogeneous inputs.

• Collaborate closely with product and end users to surface and solve high-impact problems.

• Take on pragmatic engineering work including data labeling, ETL, and deployment as needed on a small team.

What We're Looking For

• Hands-on applied computer vision and machine learning experience, including training and deploying models to production.

• Proven 0-to-1 builder mindset — experience launching AI systems or building core parts of a new product in an early-stage environment.

• Experience working with multimodal data (images, text, documents) in production settings.

• Familiarity with modern CV, LLM, and multimodal model approaches and tooling.

• Ability to iterate quickly on prototypes based on real user feedback.

• Strong communication skills and an empathetic, collaborative approach to working across a small team.

• Willingness to handle broad engineering tasks — no task is too small.

• US work authorization required; visa sponsorship is not available.

• All experience levels considered, including new graduates.

• Construction domain knowledge is a plus but not required.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $120,000 – $180,000 USD annually. Equity is expected given the founding-team nature of the role. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site, full-time in San Francisco, CA, USA. Candidates must be based in San Francisco or willing to relocate.