What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding AI Engineer position at David Joseph & Company?
San Francisco, CA
Our client is a seed-stage startup building agentic AI for the built world: multimodal agents that review construction blueprints for buildability and code compliance, becoming domain experts on rules like accessibility and fire-safety codes. They are the technical leader in their space, and their mission is to make housing more affordable — one of the very few places in tech where an engineer works directly on the housing crisis. This is a founding-engineer seat on a tiny, high-ownership team.
Founded 2025
A deeply self-directed founding AI engineering role owning the full experiment loop to improve the accuracy of the client's multimodal blueprint-compliance agents. The work is heads-down and technical, with a small amount of weekly user contact — not a forward-deployed role.
What You'll Be Doing
Requirements
- On-site
- Full-time Compensation: $160,000–$200,000 0.5–2% equity
Our client is a seed-stage startup building agentic AI for the built world: multimodal agents that review construction blueprints for buildability and code compliance, becoming domain experts on rules like accessibility and fire-safety codes. They are the technical leader in their space, and their mission is to make housing more affordable — one of the very few places in tech where an engineer works directly on the housing crisis. This is a founding-engineer seat on a tiny, high-ownership team.
Founded 2025
- 1–10 people
- Industry: Property Tech
A deeply self-directed founding AI engineering role owning the full experiment loop to improve the accuracy of the client's multimodal blueprint-compliance agents. The work is heads-down and technical, with a small amount of weekly user contact — not a forward-deployed role.
What You'll Be Doing
- Spend the majority of your time improving the accuracy of the multimodal blueprint-compliance agents — building autoresearch, improving evals, and running sweeps on experimental features you design.
- Own the full experiment loop: generating ideas, implementing them, and rigorously analyzing results on the eval framework.
- Become a domain expert on the parts of the building code that matter (accessibility, wildland-urban interface, structural and fire safety).
- Wear hats as needed: computer-vision experiments, lightweight data engineering, internal tooling, and webapp improvements.
- Roughly two hours a week of user contact and product dogfooding.
Requirements
- Highly independent and self-unblocking; able to direct your own work with minimal oversight.
- Fast-moving and prototype-oriented; you ship experiments quickly.
- Strong evaluation discipline and genuine research taste for high-risk, high-reward work.
- Either a strong software engineer eager to grow into ML/AI, or an ML/AI engineer who already prototypes fast.
- Comfortable across the stack (TypeScript front-end and back-end).
- Genuinely motivated by the mission of making housing more affordable.
- Able to work on-site in San Francisco full-time, approximately 55 hours/week with some weekend availability.
- Experience at an autonomous-vehicle company, where rigorous evaluation is second nature.
- Background in highly regulated applied-AI domains (e.g. medical or legal) where evaluation discipline is critical.
- Climate-tech or other mission-driven startup experience.
- Strong academic background.
- Genuine curiosity for digesting dense technical and regulatory material (building codes, technical diagrams).
- Work directly on the housing affordability crisis — a rare opportunity in tech.
- Founding-engineer ownership with a meaningful equity stake.
- Join the technical leader in its space, with a demo that gets strong engineers excited.
- Strong comp plus full benefits: free lunch and dinner at the office, fully paid health insurance with $1,000 /yr employer HSA contributions, and commuter and wellness benefits.
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Work policy: On-site, full-time; :55 hrs/week with some weekend availability
- Compensation: $160,000–$200,000 0.5–2% equity
- Visa sponsorship: None available; relocation supported
- Employment type: Full-time
Salary : $160,000 - $200,000