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.