Founding Engineer

Mason has cracked a research problem that went unsolved for over half a century: how to automatically check blueprints comply with the building codes. The challenge is that over a hundred thousand pages of building codes and referenced standards govern blueprints, and this complexity bottlenecks construction in America.

We’re looking for a Founding Engineer to help us scale what works for residential projects in California to all construction across the country.

You will go deep on the cutting edge of optimizing multimodal AI agents; you will hillclimb on computer vision evals; and you will run time-boxed experiments that are high-risk, high-reward. You will learn more than you ever thought possible about the ADA, Wildland-Urban Interfaces, and other wonky parts of the building code. Your work will directly affect the built environment of California within the first month of joining.

You will have a massive impact on the product, the company's future, and the country's, as we accelerate American construction. Join us.

Who you are

• Either a cracked SWE passionate about growing as an ML/AI Engineer, or a cracked ML Engineer who's fast at prototyping.
• You can run experiments quickly and develop an internal compass to estimate which hypotheses have the highest expected value to test.
• You're mission-oriented and looking for your life's work. You care about America's ability to build.
• You love ownership and don't mind ambiguity or unblocking yourself.
• You have the curiosity of a policy wonk to digest building codes and architectural diagrams.

What you'll do

• 60 % of your time will be spent design and executing experiments to improve AI agents - you'll build and test new tools, fine-tune models, optimize prompts, and more.
• Talk to users and dogfood the product weekly
• Wear hats as needed on topics ranging from running computer vision experiments, light weight data engineering, internal tooling development, web app development, and more.

Our operating principles

• Fail fast and cheap. Slugging percentage matters more than batting average.
• We can make a lot of mistakes as long as we get a few things right.
• A written culture - we document our thinking on the few things that matter most.
• Internal tooling is a first-class use of time
• In-person work is a must.

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($120k-$200k).
• Generous early-stage equity (0.5%-3%).
• Delightful snacks and a massage gun at the office.
• Free lunch and 7 pm dinners at the office.
• Fully paid health insurance.
• Opportunity to shape the future of our country.

Interview process

We aim to make this happen in 2-3 weeks:

• Initial call (30 min) - Informal chat on your interests and experience
• Take-home exercise (Week) - We'll give you a week to find building code violations in a floorplan. In so doing, you'll learn about the building codes and architectural diagrams, and gain a sense for how to automate this work.
• Coding Challenge (60 min) - Designed to mirror real work you'd do at Mason, you'll build a prototype for a slice of our product. AI coding tools are strongly encouraged.
• Cultural fit interview (30 min) - Learn more about how you've navigated challenges in (or outside) of work.
• Paid work trial (3-5 days) - We'll set you up to run evals for our multimodal agent on our repo, and we'll ask you to generate hypotheses for experiments to run, run those experiments, and then analyze them. You'll be evaluated on your speed at running thoughtful experiments. We do reference calls in parallel
• Full-time offer 🎉