Technical Co-Founder - Covellum

About Philo Ventures

Philo Ventures is a founder‑first co‑building partner based in Utah. We run residency programs that pair us with founders to build companies together — from concept to seed‑ready in under a year, versus the industry average of 3‑plus years solo. Our full‑stack co‑building team covers engineering, design, product strategy, GTM, legal, and finance. One of the highest‑leverage things we do is help great founders find the right co‑founder.

This is exactly why Covellum is in. Covellum is an AI‑powered pre‑construction cost intelligence platform that gives architects, developers, lenders, and owner‑developers instant, accurate, localized construction cost estimates early in the development process — before the expensive, time‑consuming re‑scoping cycles that happen when GC bids come back over budget. We are in active diligence with design partners including major architecture firms, institutional owner‑developers, and construction lenders, and we are moving fast.

You would be teaming up with Sam Bawden, a two‑time founder bringing decades of business development experience and a deep network across Covellum’s target customer base. Sam is the founder and principal of EDIFICE Design + Architecture, where he designs buildings on multiple continents and works directly with some of the largest construction firms in the country. He has spent his career building real relationships with the architects, developers, lenders, and contractors who sit at the center of Covellum’s market.

He is also the founder of Cardiff Snowcraft, the Utah‑born snowboard brand he started from zero in 2014 that now ships internationally. Between EDIFICE and Cardiff, Sam brings the customer, the domain, an established network of warm relationships in Covellum’s target market, and the instincts of a founder who has built a product brand from scratch. He is looking for the technical co‑founder who can match that depth on the engineering and AI side.

As the Technical Co‑Founder of Covellum, you will own the technology end‑to‑end and partner with Sam on shaping the product. This is a founder role, with all the ambiguity, ownership, and upside that implies. You will work directly with Sam, the Philo team, and our network of investors, industry experts, and design partners to take Covellum from early prototype to a system that real customers trust with real decisions.

This role is expected to evolve into a permanent technical leadership position, likely CTO, as Covellum scales. We are looking for someone who wants to own the technical foundation long‑term and help shape the product vision alongside Sam.

• Own the technical vision and architecture. Make the core calls on stack, data model, agent orchestration, retrieval strategy, and infrastructure. Decide what to build, what to buy, and what to defer. You are the architect of record.
• Design the agentic core. Covellum is an agentic product. You will design how agents ingest plans, query cost data, reason about scope and assumptions, and produce defensible estimates — including the orchestration, tool use, memory, and evaluation layers underneath. The hard part isn’t getting a demo to work; it’s getting a developer or a lender to trust the output.
• Build the data layer. Construction cost intelligence is a data problem before it’s an AI problem. You will design the pipelines, schemas, and storage (relational, vector, geospatial) that let Covellum produce localized, accurate estimates and improve over time.
• Ship the 0‑to‑1 product. Drive the build to first paying customers. Philo’s engineering team builds alongside you — you are not the lone engineer trying to ship everything. As Covellum scales, transition from primary builder to engineering leader without losing technical depth.
• Shape the product alongside Sam. Sam brings the customer and the domain. You bring the technical lens on what’s possible, where AI is brittle, and how the system has to feel for an architect or a developer to trust it. Product strategy is something the two of you build together.
• Build the engineering team. Recruit the founding engineers when the time is…