hybrid
Founding AI/ML Engineer
AI/ML Engineer
The Founding AI/ML Engineer will architect and ship production-grade AI systems, focusing on multimodal intelligence, document understanding, and agentic workflow automation for the construction industry. This role involves building and owning AI systems end-to-end, from design to deployment and optimization, to automate core operational tasks.
About the role
About the Role
We are hiring a Founding AI/ML Engineer to architect and ship production-grade AI systems transforming one of the world’s largest and least automated industries — construction. This is a product-first AI engineering role focused on multimodal intelligence, document understanding, and agentic workflow automation. You will work directly with the Chief AI Officer and founders to move from low-automation to high-automation mode, where AI agents perform core operational work with light human oversight.
Details
- Location: Philadelphia, PA · New York City, NY · Washington, D.C.
- Work Model: Hybrid / Remote-first with optional Philly hub
- Employment Type: Full-Time
- Experience Level: 6+ years
- Equity: Competitive early-employee equity
- Visa Sponsorship: H-1B available
Key Responsibilities
- Build and ship production-grade AI systems used daily by real customers
- Design multimodal pipelines for drawings, specs, and construction documents
- Build agentic workflows automating preconstruction tasks:
- Document intake
- Extraction
- Takeoff support
- Bid preparation
- QA workflows
- Build and improve:
- Retrieval systems (embeddings, reranking, chunking)
- Evaluation systems
- Orchestration layers
- Optimize model quality, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency
- Prototype and iterate quickly on customer-facing AI features
- Own systems end-to-end (experiment → deploy → monitor → improve)
- Help shape engineering culture and long-term technical direction
Requirements
- 6+ years of engineering experience
- Experience at an early-stage, high-growth startup
- Shipped production-grade AI systems to real customers
- Hands-on LLM and/or computer vision experience
- Retrieval systems experience (embeddings, chunking, grounding)
- Agentic workflow experience (tools, APIs, state management, retries, guardrails)
- Strong backend fundamentals:
- APIs
- Async jobs / queues
- Databases
- Cloud deployment
- Monitoring
- Full end-to-end ownership mindset
Nice to Have
- Construction / AEC exposure
- Multimodal AI or document intelligence background
- OCR / segmentation / computer vision experience
- Experience converting human-operated workflows into AI product systems
- Inference optimization or evaluation system expertise
Benefits
- Meaningful early-employee ESOP grant
- Employer-funded health insurance (Patch model)
- Team / meal stipend
- Growth path to technical leadership (optional management track)