AI Operations Engineer

Pulley; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Pulley is hiring a founding AI Operations Engineer to build integrations, AI workflows, and automations that fit how strategic customers work. You’ll own the quality and reliability of what you ship, ensuring safe data handling and seamless adoption across teams.

You’ll collaborate across Permit Ops, customers, and Product as Pulley expands into due diligence and code checks. This role sits within the Engineering team and emphasizes hands-on building over planning.

Qualifications

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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. No data leaks, no unsafe writes
• 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
• Build the evals and monitoring that tell us whether an AI workflow is getting it right, because a wrong answer means a rejected permit and a delayed opening
• 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

Skills

Fast learner

Shipping AI tools

Security-minded

Clear communicator

Ownership

AI tooling Claude Code

Education

CS or adjacent technical degree

Tools

Retool

n8n

Zapier

MCP connectors

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 own whether what you ship actually works and can be trusted, not just whether it’s live.

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. As Pulley expands beyond permitting into due diligence, code check, and more, you’ll work across all of it.

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. No data leaks, no unsafe writes

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, because a wrong answer means a rejected permit and a delayed opening

• 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, not a roadmap owner. You’ve shipped real AI tools or agents, and you’d rather build the thing than write the plan for it

• 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

• Security-minded. You think about what could leak or break before you ship, especially when you’re touching someone else’s systems

• A clear communicator. You can work directly with customers and internal teams without needing someone to translate

• Quality-obsessed. You care as much about whether something works as whether it shipped

• Ownership. When something is broken, you fix it

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

• Room to grow: potential to build and lead the team as it scales