{"id":1262469,"url":"https://alion.io/job/autositu-founding-engineer-arkhe","title":"Founding Engineer - Arkhe","company":{"id":3779707,"name":"AutoSitu","domain":"autositu.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/autositu","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":120000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Digital Twin","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Mastra","optional":true},{"name":"Next.js","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Supabase","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T20:57:57Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-09-28T03:43:08Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"Our mission\nAutoSitu’s mission is to increase global GDP by making development approvals faster, clearer, and more consistent.\nEvery new home, hospital, school, data center, factory, and piece of infrastructure must move through layers of design review, code compliance, coordination, and government approval before it can be built. These processes shape how quickly communities grow, but much of the work is still performed manually across spreadsheets, PDFs, email threads, disconnected regulations, siloed BIM and discipline models and hundreds-or thousands-of pages of technical drawings.\nThe result is months of avoidable delay, repeated review cycles, costly rework, and experienced professionals spending their time searching for information instead of making decisions.\nWe are starting with autonomous development-review agents that understand plans, research requirements, identify issues, gather evidence, and escalate the judgment calls that genuinely require human expertise. Over time, this foundation will power agents that can help design, coordinate, and build the physical world.\nIf we get this right, housing, infrastructure, and economic development will move faster around the world.\nWho we are\nAutoSitu was founded by George Zhai and Xuanshu “Asher” Lin. George brings expertise in robotics, autonomous systems, and applied AI, while Asher brings experience across architecture, urban planning, and development review. Together, they combine frontier automation expertise with firsthand knowledge of the systems governing how cities and buildings get built and approved.\nWhat you will own and drive\nAs a Founding Engineer, you will work directly with the founders on ambitious applied-AI and distributed-systems problems spanning multimodal reasoning, spatial intelligence, and the built world. You will help build BIM-native systems that understand plans, models, technical documents, regulations, and spatial relationships, and power autonomous agents that review, reason about, and coordinate complex development and construction projects.\nOver time, these systems will evolve into a persistent intelligence layer that can help teams understand, design, coordinate, review, and ultimately build the physical world.\nYou will:\nDevelop the core intelligence behind autonomous agents for reviewing, designing, and coordinating the built world.\nCreate physical-AI systems that understand BIM models, 3D geometry, spatial relationships, and real-world constraints.\nBuild the persistent project intelligence layer that allows AutoSitu to understand one project continuously as it moves from feasibility through design and construction.\n\nDesign distributed workflows that coordinate specialized agents across multimodal project artifacts in parallel.\nEstablish the context and data infrastructure for city-scale digital twins that autonomous agents can understand, design, and act within.\nCreate evaluation infrastructure for high-stakes outputs where accuracy, evidence, and judgment all matter\nImprove agent reliability through structured reasoning, retries, observability, human feedback, and failure analysis\nOwn product features end to end-from system architecture and model behavior to UI, deployment, and customer feedback\nWork directly with architects, engineers, developers, contractors, and public-sector reviewers to understand how the product performs on real projects\nMake foundational decisions about our engineering architecture, product direction, and technical culture\nWhat to expect in your first 90 days\n0-30 days: Learn the product, customers, review workflows, and core AI architecture. Begin shipping improvements to the agent and evaluation infrastructure.\n30-60 days: Own a meaningful product or intelligence workflow end to end, from technical design through deployment and evaluation on active projects.\n60-90 days: Lead the development and customer rollout of a core capability used in real development-review workflows.\nYou will not spend your first several months waiting for a roadmap or being assigned isolated tickets. You will be expected to understand the problem, make decisions, build the solution, and learn directly from how customers use it.\nWe are looking for someone who\nHas built and shipped technically ambitious products\nWants to work across AI systems, backend infrastructure, product, and frontend when necessary\nUnderstands that reliability, traceability, and evaluation matter more than impressive demos\nThinks carefully about concurrency, state, retries, idempotency, rate limits, and failure modes\nIs deeply curious about frontier multimodal and agentic architectures\nCan turn ambiguous, real-world workflows into clear technical systems\nWants to speak directly with customers and understand the domain rather than build from a distance\nMoves quickly while maintaining strong engineering judgment\nIs comfortable entering a complex industry and learning from experienced practitioners\nWants substantial ownership and responsibility at an early-stage company\nCares about improving how housing, infrastructure, and communities get built\nExperience in architecture, construction, permitting, or government is not required. A willingness to learn the domain deeply is.\nOur technology\nWe are building distributed, multimodal AI systems that orchestrate specialized agents across technical documents, BIM models, spatial data, and 3D/4D environments.\nOur platform combines multimodal foundation models, agentic vision, multi-agent workflows, BIM-native intelligence, spatial reasoning, a knowledge-graph context engine, document retrieval, evidence localization, and rigorous evaluation infrastructure.\nOur stack includes TypeScript, Next.js, Mastra, Postgres, Supabase, Inngest, cloud infrastructure, and modern language and vision models.\nWe care less about whether you have used every tool in our current stack and more about whether you can reason from first principles, choose pragmatic technologies, and build systems that work reliably for real users.\nHow we work\nOwnership over narrow roles. Early team members own problems end to end rather than operating within rigid functional boundaries.\nStay close to the customer. Everyone learns directly from the people using the product. Customer conversations are part of product development, not a separate function.\nEvidence over intuition. We test our systems on real projects, build evaluations, investigate failures, and improve based on what the evidence shows.\nSpeed with judgment. We move quickly, but we do not confuse unnecessary complexity with technical sophistication.\nLow ego, direct communication. We challenge ideas openly, acknowledge mistakes quickly, and prioritize the quality of the outcome over who proposed it.\nMission-oriented. We are building infrastructure for how the physical world gets reviewed and approved. The work is difficult, but the potential economic impact is enormous.\nWhy join\nYou will join early enough to shape the product, architecture, culture, and direction of the company.\nYou will work directly with the founders, ship into active projects, interact with customers making real development decisions, and solve applied-AI problems that do not have established playbooks.\nThe opportunity is larger than automating individual plan checks. We are building the intelligence layer through which cities and development teams understand, design, review, coordinate, and ultimately build the physical world.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7456,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Real Estate","Property Development","Operating Systems"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T20:57:57Z"}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:3","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/autositu-founding-engineer-arkhe","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/autositu-founding-engineer-arkhe.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T04:35:05Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2879,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2121,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}