Founding 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

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.