Founding AI Engineer ON-SITE
Location: San Francisco, CA | Work arrangement: ON-SITE
Compensation: $160,000–$200,000 base + 0.5–2% equity | Employment: Full-time
Experience: 2–8 years | Visa sponsorship: none | Openings: 1
Schedule: in person in San Francisco every day, roughly 55 hours per week with weekend availability
Our Ref: GEN-0012 | Client Ref: 4R4X37Y7
Company Confidential
About the Company
A seed-stage company (founded 2025) on the frontier of agentic AI for the built world, building the technical leader in AI that checks whether construction blueprints are buildable and safe. Its multimodal agents review blueprints for building-code compliance, becoming domain experts on rules such as ADA and Wildland-Urban Interface requirements. The work directly affects California's built environment within a new hire's first month. The company grew out of a pro-housing organization in San Francisco, and its mission is to solve the housing crisis: if it wins, the cost of building housing drops meaningfully and rents get more affordable. It is one of very few places in tech where an engineer can work directly on housing, and that mission, shared by its investors, is the single strongest draw. It has raised $4.3M, is the technical leader in its space, and its product demo reliably gets strong engineers excited.
The Role
A deeply self-directed founding engineering role at a tiny team of three. The bulk of the work is running experiments end to end on the company's eval framework: generating hypotheses, implementing experiments, and analyzing results to improve the accuracy of the multimodal agents that check blueprints for code compliance. It demands someone independent and self-unblocking with strong research taste.
Two profiles have worked here: an exceptional software engineer who wants to break into AI research, and an AI/ML engineer already established in the space. The work is heads-down and technical, with only about 2 hours a week talking to users (this is not a forward-deployed role). Expectations are high: roughly 55 hours a week with weekend availability, in person in San Francisco every day, in exchange for a large chunk of ownership.
Key Responsibilities
- Improve the accuracy of the multimodal blueprint-compliance agents by building autoresearch, improving evals, and running sweeps on experimental features you design
- Own the full experiment loop: ideas, implementation, and rigorous analysis on the eval framework
- Become a domain expert on the parts of the building code that matter (ADA, Wildland-Urban Interfaces, structural and fire safety)
- Wear other hats as needed: computer-vision experiments, lightweight data engineering, internal tooling, and webapp improvements
- Stay in weekly contact with users and dogfood the product (about 2 hours a week)
Requirements
- Independent and self-unblocking, able to direct your own work with minimal oversight
- High velocity: fast at prototyping and shipping experiments
- Rigorous about evaluation, with genuine research taste to steer high-risk, high-reward work
- Either a strong software engineer eager to grow into ML/AI, or an ML/AI engineer already fast at prototyping
- Genuine mission alignment with solving the housing crisis
- Able to work in person in San Francisco, about 55 hours a week with weekend availability
Nice to Have
- Background at a self-driving car company (for example Waymo or Zoox), where evaluation rigor is life-or-death
- Experience at highly regulated application-layer AI startups (medical, legal)
- Experience at climate-tech startups
- Strong academic background
- The curiosity of a policy wonk to digest building codes and architectural diagrams
Compensation and Perks
- $160,000-$200,000 base salary plus 0.5-2% equity
- Free lunch and dinner
- Fully paid health insurance, with a $1,000+ per year employer HSA contribution
- Commuter benefit ($100 per month) and wellness benefit ($50 per month)
Interested? Apply for this role (Ref GEN-0012)