Founding AI/ML Engineer

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)