AI Operations Engineer

Pulley; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Pulley in San Francisco is hiring its founding AI Operations Engineer. You’ll build tools, integrations, and automations that embed Pulley into how our strategic customers operate, and lighten the Permit Ops team’s workload.

You’ll collaborate with Engineering, Permit Ops, customers, and Product to identify slow-downs, design solutions, and iterate until they fit securely and reliably. This is a hands-on, impact-driven startup role.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software/ops engineering, applied AI, or a similar hands-on building role.
• CS or adjacent technical degree.
• Track record of shipping AI-powered tools, agents, or automations that are still running in production (portfolio a big plus).
• Fluency with AI coding and agent tooling like Claude Code or Cursor as a daily practice.
• Solid engineering fundamentals: APIs, data, secure systems, debugging what you didn’t build.
• Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and willing to work in person 4 days a week.

Responsibilities

• Work with strategic customers to understand rollout needs and how Pulley plugs in.
• Build integrations, data syncs, and AI workflows connecting Pulley to customers' systems, safely.
• Map how work actually gets done with Permit Ops PMs and spot what to automate.
• Build lightweight internal agents, tools, and automations alongside the core product.
• Ensure teams adopt and trust what you ship.
• Build evals and monitoring to assess AI workflow accuracy.
• Turn fixes into reusable tools and playbooks for customers and PMs.
• Share learnings with Product and Engineering to improve the platform weekly.
• Push back when a request won’t actually solve the problem.

Skills

Rapid learning

Builder mindset

Process optimization

Strong engineering

Clear communicator

Education

CS or adjacent technical degree

Tools

Retool

n8n

Zapier

MCP connectors

Custom tooling

Job description

About Pulley

Pulley helps the country’s top architects, builders, and retailers speed up every project in their portfolio. With AI-powered permitting intelligence and expert guidance, we eliminate costly delays and bring predictability across the full lifecycle of commercial projects.

Today, permitting is the slowest, most uncertain part of building, spread across 19,000+ jurisdictions with different rules, timelines, and surprises. Pulley gives project teams the clarity and predictability they need to move from planning to opening without delays.

We support rollout programs for brands like J.Crew, Solidcore, and Hibbett Sports, as well as major data center buildouts, EV charging networks, and other commercial projects. Our platform dramatically reduces approval timelines, improves forecasting accuracy, and removes thousands of hours of manual work from design and construction teams.

Founded in 2021, Pulley combines deep permitting expertise with purpose-built AI from people who have created products used by millions. We’re backed by CRV, Susa Ventures, Fifth Wall, and leaders from Plaid, Segment, ServiceTitan, and Procore.

About the Role

We're hiring our founding AI Operations Engineer. You'll be a founding member of this team, building the tools, integrations, and automations that make Pulley fit seamlessly into how our strategic customers work, plus the agents and automations that take manual work off our Permit Ops team.

You’ll sit on our Engineering team and work across Permit Ops, customers, and Product. You'll find the process that's slowing people down, build the thing that fixes it, and keep improving it until it works.

What You'll Do

External

• Work with our strategic customers, alongside the account leads who own the relationship, to understand how they run their rollouts and where Pulley needs to plug in
• Build integrations, data syncs, and AI workflows that connect Pulley to customers' systems, safely

Internal

• Sit with our Permit Ops PMs, map how work actually gets done, and spot what's worth automating and what should stay human
• Build fast, lightweight internal agents, tools, and automations that take manual research and admin work off their plate, alongside what's in the core product
• Make sure teams actually adopt and trust what you ship

Across both

• Build the evals and monitoring that tell us whether an AI workflow is getting it right
• Turn one-off fixes into reusable tools and playbooks that work for every customer and every PM
• Bring what you learn back to Product and Engineering so the platform gets better every week
• Push back when a request won't actually solve the problem

Who You Are

• High slope. You learn fast and have a track record of leveling up quickly
• A builder mindset. You've shipped real AI tools or agents to solve complex problems
• Process-minded. You like figuring out how work actually gets done and making it faster, whether that's for a customer or your own team
• Solid engineering. You can build secure production systems, work with APIs and data, and debug systems you didn't build
• A clear communicator. You can work directly with customers and internal teams without needing someone to translate

Need to Have

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, ops engineering, applied AI, or a similar hands-on building role
• CS or adjacent technical degree
• A track record of shipping AI-powered tools, agents, or automations that are still running in production (a portfolio or examples are a big plus)
• Fluency with AI coding and agent tooling like Claude Code or Cursor as a daily practice
• Solid engineering fundamentals: you can work with APIs and data, build reliable and secure systems, and debug things you didn't build
• Experience working directly with customers or external stakeholders
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and willing to work in person 4 days a week

Nice to Haves

• Experience in construction tech, govtech, proptech, or another domain where the hard part is messy real-world documents and processes
• Experience building internal tools or ops tooling (Retool, n8n, Zapier, MCP connectors, or custom)
• Experience designing evals or otherwise making LLM-powered workflows reliable in production
• Early-stage startup or founder experience
• Interest in helping build and eventually lead a team

Why This Role

• Founding role: you shape what AIOps looks like at Pulley
• Big scope: customer integrations and internal tooling, across every product line we launch