Founding AI Engineer

About the Role This is a founding engineering position at an early-stage construction technology startup building an AI intelligence layer that transforms messy blueprints, permits, and construction documents into actionable cost estimates and permit insights. You'll own the modeling and AI systems end-to-end, working directly with users and product to ship impactful solutions in a domain that touches housing, hospitals, and schools. What You'll Do Apply state-of-the-art computer vision, LLM, and multimodal AI techniques to real-world construction documents. Prioritize the intelligence layer — modeling, data pipelines, and inference — over application UI. Rapidly prototype models and iterate based on user feedback and real-world data. Build and deploy production AI systems that handle noisy, heterogeneous inputs. Collaborate closely with product and users to identify and solve high-impact problems. Take on pragmatic engineering tasks including data labeling, ETL, and deployment as part of a small team. Communicate progress and tradeoffs with clarity, empathy, and transparency. What We're Looking For Hands-on experience applying computer vision, multimodal AI, and LLM techniques to production systems — ideally on real-world documents or similarly messy data. 0-to-1 builder mindset: experience launching AI systems into production or building core parts of a new product from scratch. Comfort working end-to-end on AI systems with a focus on the intelligence layer, not the application layer. Ability to iterate quickly on prototypes informed by real user feedback. Strong communication skills and an honest, empathetic approach to collaboration. Willingness to embrace the full range of early-stage engineering work, including the less glamorous parts. Experience level is open — new grads with strong production AI projects are welcome. Construction domain knowledge is a plus but not required. US work authorization required; visa sponsorship is not available. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $120,000 – $180,000 USD annually. Equity participation is available as part of a founding team package. Location On-site in San Francisco, CA . Relocation is welcome; this is a full-time, in-office role.