Senior Research Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Oregon.

📋 Description

• Develop and enhance the AI systems that drive SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap.

• Create systems that convert zoning regulations, council meeting minutes, assessor and recorder documents, permits, parcel geometry, and other public records into actionable insights.

• Design agentic tools to discover, crawl, and extract information from thousands of municipal and county resources.

• Ensure extraction systems are code-driven, efficient, and dependable enough for nationwide operation.

• Collaborate with the evals team to build ground-truth and benchmark datasets, utilizing them to enhance extraction and inference precision.

• Scale inference and data processing across national operations involving hundreds of millions of records, overseeing throughput, cost, and error management.

• Work extensively with geospatial data at scale, encompassing parcel geometry, zoning, topography, and market data across all 50 states.

• Deliver production-quality code in pipelines and services, integrating research outputs into the platform.

• Partner with the engineering team on architectural decisions and with the product team on feature prioritization.

• Assess and incorporate new AI capabilities as the field develops.

• Collaborate directly with the Chief AI Officer on Prophetic's AI core.

⛳️ Requirements

• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship.

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative discipline — or equivalent industry experience.

• Over 5 years of software engineering experience in delivering production systems.

• Strong systems engineering skills: data pipelines, orchestration, and agentic systems operational in production.

• Experience in scaling large systems focused on model inference and data processing — including throughput limits, cost management, batch orchestration, and understanding failures at hundreds of millions of rows.

• In-depth, hands-on experience with LLMs in production, including prompt and context engineering and evaluation.

• Proficient in Python with the ability to manage your own deployments.

• Familiarity with geospatial data (PostGIS, spatial analysis, satellite imagery) is a plus.

• Background in optimization or computational geometry is preferred.

• Minimum of 2 years at an early-stage startup is advantageous.

• Experience in proptech or real estate data is a bonus.

🏝️ Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for you; 30% coverage for dependents.

• Competitive salary along with meaningful early-stage equity.

• Unlimited paid time off (PTO).

• Hybrid/Remote work stipend.

• In-office amenities: snacks, beverages, coffee, ping-pong table, and more — plus cuddles from Olive, our office Doberman!

• Budget allocated for intra-office travel.

• 2–3 annual team gatherings in person.

• Flexible options for remote, hybrid, or in-office working arrangements.