Founding AI Platform Engineer (Hands-On CTO Track

Founding AI Platform Engineer

Build the AI-enabled operating system for an emerging institutional finance category.

Our client is a New York City-based real estate capital company working to make Home builder Finance a repeatable, data-driven asset class.

Thousands of capable regional and local homebuilders need more efficient access to capital. Institutional investors want short-duration, collateralized residential credit exposure, but home builder loans remain fragmented, bespoke, inconsistently underwritten, and difficult to evaluate as a programmatic investment pool.

The company is building the standard that connects them: the data model, underwriting framework, governance, workflows, and operating infrastructure that allow institutional capital to evaluate, finance, monitor, and invest in Home builder Finance at scale.

A meaningful amount of the underlying technology and agent architecture is already operating. Real business needs—underwriting, financial models, investor materials, decisions, communications, and internal workflows—already enter the system and produce useful work.

The initial bootstrap is complete. Now the company needs a second builder.

You will work directly inside the codebase, extend the system, make it usable across the organization, and become the technical counterpart who can carry the product and systems vision forward without waiting for a fully specified roadmap.

You will own work across full-stack product development, applied AI, data, infrastructure, and business operations.

Your work will directly affect how the company evaluates builders, underwrites transactions, matches opportunities with capital partners, creates investor materials, and learns across every builder and deal.

You will:

• Extend the production platform and agent architecture across builder intake, underwriting, capital matching, reporting, communications, and internal decision-making.
• Translate ambiguous, partially articulated operating problems into clear specifications and useful products.
• Build a common data layer connecting builder documentation, credit analysis, investment memoranda, capital-partner requirements, and persistent builder profiles.
• Design dependable workflows that combine deterministic software, AI, human judgment, approvals, and auditable override trails.
• Build full-stack tools that work for ordinary business users—not only for the technical people who created them.
• Own the production lifecycle from architecture and implementation through testing, deployment, observability, and iteration.
• Decide what should be built, bought, automated, kept manual, or governed by human review.
• Help establish the technical standards, architecture, and eventual engineering organization behind the platform.

This is not a conventional corporate IT role, a maintenance seat, or an executive position removed from the codebase. The mandate is to close the distance between messy business needs and dependable working systems.

You are an established but still deeply hands-on builder with:

• A substantial software engineering record, typically 10 or more years, including meaningful ownership of complex production systems.
• Deep full-stack experience, typically five or more years, spanning modern frontend development, backend systems, data, cloud infrastructure, and production operations.
• Strong experience with a modern frontend framework and JavaScript or Type Script.
• Meaningful backend and systems depth, with the ability to reason across an entire production environment.
• Practical experience with deployment, observability, infrastructure, cloud systems, and Dev Ops.
• Evidence that you have personally designed, built, tested, shipped, operated, and materially evolved consequential production systems.
• Direct applied-AI experience—such as agent orchestration, LLM-powered products, AI-enabled internal tools, or serious development workflows using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or comparable tools.
• A realistic understanding of AI's limitations, failure modes, evaluation requirements, and appropriate role in production systems.
• Experience beyond a narrow engineering lane, such as founding a company or working…