Sr. Research Engineer

Prophetic Software is not able to sponsor employment visas now or in the future. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship to be considered for this role.

Real estate development is a multi-billion-dollar industry that has run on fragmented data, manual processes, and gut instinct for decades. Prophetic is changing that. We're building the AI-native platform that enables homebuilders, developers, and investors to find, analyze, and act on land opportunities from a single system — powered by proprietary technologies that process billions of data points across all 50 states.

We are the market leader in our space, and our customers don't just use the product — they love it. We're not making teams more efficient. We're changing how they operate.

Prophetic is scaling fast — demand is outpacing our ability to hire, and we're just getting started. This is a once-in-a-lifetime team: sharp, low ego, deeply collaborative, and obsessed with building the best product in the industry. Come disrupt an industry with us.

You'll work directly with our Chief AI Officer on the AI core of Prophetic's platform. The research team builds the pipelines, models, and intelligence that power SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and Dev Map. This is not a pure research role; you ship production code that runs nationally.

Your work spans agentic systems and pipelines, harness engineering, data engineering, and machine learning applications. You'll build the systems that turn messy public records (zoning ordinances, council minutes, assessor and recorder files, permits, parcel geometry, etc.) into answers a land team can act on in seconds.

This is a high-bar, PhD-level (or equivalent) role. You'll operate at the intersection of research and production engineering, turning cutting-edge AI into shipped product features.

• Build and improve the AI systems powering SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and Dev Map.

  • SearchAI finds the parcels in a market that can actually support what you want to build.

  • ZoneAI reads municipal zoning ordinances nationwide and turns them into structured, parcel-level buildability rules.

  • SiteAI generates road and lot layouts on a real parcel and reports how many homes it will actually yield.

  • CouncilAI harvests city council and planning commission agendas and minutes to surface development and entitlement activity as it happens.

  • Dev Map detects and attributes residential development nationwide, with lot, builder, and

• Design agentic harnesses that discover, crawl, and extract from thousands of municipal and county sources, then make them code-driven, efficient, and reliable enough to run nationwide.

• Work with our evals team to build the ground-truth and benchmark sets, then use them to drive real accuracy gains on extraction and inference.

• Scale inference and data processing: throughput, cost, and failure handling across national runs over hundreds of millions of records.

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

• Ship production-quality code in our pipelines and services, and integrate research outputs into the platform.

• Collaborate with engineering on architecture decisions and with product on feature prioritization.

• Evaluate and integrate new AI capabilities as the field evolves.

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent depth built in industry.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems.

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

• Experience scaling large systems around model inference…