Jobs · Engineering · California

Founding AI Engineer

RecruiterDrive · San Francisco, CA · 1 wk ago
On-siteEngineering$165k–$210k/yrFull-time

About the role

The team is building multimodal AI agents that read architectural drawing sets and check them for code compliance — turning a months-long review into a single day. You'd be one of the first 1–3 engineering hires.

What you'll actually do

  • Every week: form a hypothesis about why the agent misread a drawing, run a time-boxed experiment, measure it honestly, and ship what wins
  • Improve accuracy of multimodal agents that read and reason over architectural documents
  • Work across supervised fine-tuning, distillation, auto-research, retrieval, and context engineering
  • Run computer-vision evals and build the internal tooling that makes everyone else's experiments faster
  • Direct your own research roadmap — if an experiment doesn't duplicate work or block someone, nobody says no
  • Talk to users and dogfood the product weekly

Your work ships to real users inside your first month. There is no six-week onboarding.

You'll fit if

  • 2–8 years in software engineering or ML, focused on AI/LLM applications
  • BS in CS, ML, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience
  • Production LLM / AI-agent experience (stack: Python, TypeScript, Next.js, LangGraph)
  • You use Claude Code, Cursor, or similar every day — here they're infrastructure, not a novelty
  • You've designed and run ML evals and experiments
  • You blend SWE speed with ML rigor: not too researchy, but never skipping the measurement
  • Highly autonomous — you generate your own experiments and manage your own workload

Why take this seat

  • A real founding stake. 0.75–2% equity at a $30M cap, on a three-person team where the founders still own most of the company.
  • Physical-world impact. Your model's accuracy is measured in how fast actual apartments clear review.
  • Maximum autonomy. Your own research roadmap from week one.
  • Taken care of: $165K–$210K base, fully paid health insurance with $1,000+/yr HSA contribution, free lunch and dinner, 401(k), commuter benefits, monthly wellness benefit.

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