Founding Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Jersey City, New Jersey, United States — hybrid

Salary: $150,000–$180,000 base salary per year plus equity

Company

Early-stage technology company using AI to make complex infrastructure regulations, technical standards, permitting requirements, and agency guidance searchable, structured, explainable, and actionable.

What you will do

• Design and build backend architecture for an AI-powered regulatory intelligence platform.
• Build pipelines to discover, ingest, classify, and monitor regulatory changes across federal, state, and local governments.
• Develop permitting workflows that translate regulations into requirements, decision points, and permit pathways.
• Build AI and LLM-powered workflows for extracting structured, explainable knowledge from regulatory documents.
• Design APIs and services connecting regulatory intelligence with mapping and workflow products.
• Build search, retrieval, knowledge representation, and large-scale geospatial data processing systems while making key architecture decisions.

Requirements

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with significant ownership of production systems.
• Strong experience designing and building search systems.
• Experience with GraphQL and REST APIs.
• Experience building AI agents, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered automation using tools such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, or OpenAI APIs.
• Strong Python development skills, modern Python frameworks, PostgreSQL, and relational databases.
• Comfort working with large datasets.

Nice to have

• Experience with spatial indexing, GIS, or mapping frameworks.
• Background in infrastructure, energy, environmental permitting, utilities, or regulatory technology.
• Experience at a high-growth startup or on a founding engineering team.
• Experience building 0-to-1 products and taking systems from concept through production.

Culture & Benefits

• Founding engineering role with direct collaboration with the founders.
• Significant influence over technical direction, architecture, and product decisions.
• Equity included in the compensation package.
• Inclusive workplace with accessibility adjustments available throughout the application and interview process.