AI Founding Software Engineer

Founding Software Engineer
Location: Jersey City, NJ On-siteSalary: base + equityRole Type: Full-time
Stelvio are working with a client building AI-powered technology designed to make complex regulatory and permitting information easier to understand, navigate, and act on.The company is tackling a significant challenge within infrastructure development: critical requirements are often spread across thousands of government agencies, regulatory documents, technical standards, and guidance materials. Their platform brings this information together, using AI to deliver clear, explainable insights backed by authoritative sources.
They are now looking for a Founding Software Engineer to join a small engineering team and play a major role in shaping the product and its technical architecture.This is a high-ownership position where you will work closely with the founders, engineers, and subject matter experts, making important technical decisions while building systems across AI, search, data processing, geospatial information, and customer-facing workflows.
ResponsibilitiesBuild pipelines to discover, ingest, classify, and monitor regulatory information across federal, state, and local government sources.Develop structured permitting workflows that turn complex requirements into clear steps, dependencies, decision points, and pathways.Build AI-powered workflows that extract structured and explainable information from dense regulatory documents.Develop APIs connecting regulatory intelligence with mapping and workflow products.Design systems capable of efficiently processing large regulatory and geospatial datasets.Contribute to key architectural decisions, balancing rapid product development with long-term scalability and maintainability.Work closely with customers and subject matter experts to understand requirements and translate them into effective technical solutions.
Qualifications4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems.Experience designing and building search systems.Experience working with GraphQL and REST APIs.Experience developing AI agents, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered automation using technologies such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Assistants/Responses API, or similar frameworks.Strong experience building production APIs and services with modern Python frameworks.Experience working with PostgreSQL and databases.Comfortable building and operating systems involving large datasets.Experience deploying and running production services using cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Render, Vercel, or similar.Familiarity with containers, CI/CD, observability, and production reliability practices.Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment with significant ownership and autonomy.GIS, spatial indexing, or mapping experience would be beneficial but is not required.Exposure to infrastructure, energy, utilities, environmental permitting, or regulatory workflows would be advantageous.Previous experience in a high-growth startup, founding engineering team, or 0-to-1 product environment is beneficial.
BenefitsMeaningful equity through stock options.Option to trade a portion of salary for increased equity.Benefits package.Relocation assistance available.Opportunity to join at an early stage and have significant influence over technical architecture and product direction.Work directly with the founders and take ownership of technically challenging problems across AI, search, data, and geospatial systems.