San Francisco, CA Onsite Full-TimeWe'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 → ITERATEMost 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.
BenefitsSalary: $160K-$200K Base
Equity: 0.5%-2%Employment Type: Full-Time
Visa Sponsorship: None Available 
