Founding Engineer Engineering San Francisco · Hybrid $150–250K + equity View role

Truebase; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Truebase is seeking a founding engineer to own all architecture and technical decisions, reporting directly to the CEO. You will build a product that turns fragmented real estate data into trusted insights used for multi‑million-dollar decisions, shaping both system design and AI strategy.

You will collaborate with the CEO to co-create the product roadmap, interact with senior customers, and implement scalable, production-grade solutions while enjoying equity and an influential role in the

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience building full-stack applications.
• Translate customer needs into scalable software solutions.
• Experience or interest in AI-enabled systems is a plus.
• Strong communication with executives and customers.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical decisions for the product.
• Collaborate with the CEO and customers to co-create the roadmap.
• Design and own the AI architecture combining model reasoning, rules, tools, and human oversight.
• Define interfaces for performance review, recommendations, and actions approval.
• Build DevOps, CI/CD, observability, monitoring and deployment processes.

Skills

Full-stack development

React

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

AWS

DevOps

CI/CD

Observability

Customer interaction

Tools

Git

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Truebase is an opportunity to join an experienced team, at the right time, in a huge and underserved market. Real estate is the biggest asset class on earth. $393 trillion, about four times global GDP. It still runs on Excel and PDFs. Software has barely touched it. The software that did reach it was clunky, unintuitive, and universally disliked (it has made some of our customers cry). But AI has given the industry hope for the first time; hope for software that actually drives bottom-line impact, plus boardroom mandates to use AI and budget to support that adoption.

We are a team of startup operators (early hires at 2 unicorns, 2nd-time founders), marrying deep real estate workflow knowledge / network with technical expertise. We're already live with owners managing billions in assets, with dozens more customers on our waitlist, and 50+ in our pipeline.

As the most senior technical team member, you'd own all architecture and technical calls and report directly to the founder and CEO. You'd build hand-in-hand with the CEO: talking to C-suite level customers and co-creating our product roadmap. And finally: each Truebase team member has experienced being an early startup employee. We recognize the huge impact you'll have on the success of this business, and we compensate accordingly: equity, access to the Truebase team's network of operators and investors, and ownership over what you build.

Some things to know

Our product

Truebase is a canonical financial data layer plus a reasoning system for analysis and action. We eliminate 90% of rote work for real estate owners. Think: monthly financial statement reviews, Excel modelling, writing reports. Then, we identify and execute the moves that will boost net operating income (NOI). Owners on Truebase can expect to see a 7–20% profit lift. Behind the scenes:

• The data layer: ingesting and standardizing fragmented financial data (PDFs, Excels, transaction ledgers) plus organizational context stored in email inboxes, meeting notes, and spreadsheets into one system of record.
• The proprietary intelligence layer: a reasoning system that reconciles inconsistent property data, traces conclusions to source documents, and produces recommendations customers can audit.
• The application layer: the UI/UX owners use to review performance, investigate recommendations, and approve actions.

Our team

Truebase was founded by Sal Rao (ex-GlossGenius, ex-McKinsey Real Estate practice). Sal and engineers from MIT are building Truebase based on her work at McKinsey, where she ran profit optimization projects for real estate asset managers that drove 7–20% NOI lift. That work cost clients millions and took 4–6 weeks; Truebase does it in 15 seconds.

The role

As a Founding Engineer at Truebase, you'll build the system that turns fragmented real estate data into accurate, traceable insights customers can trust to make multi-million-dollar decisions. You'll own:

• Working directly with customers, translating recurring workflows / pain points into scalable product abstractions, and owning delivery through technical design, implementation, and production deployment.
• Designing and owning our AI architecture: combining model reasoning, retrieval, deterministic rules, tool use, and human approval to deliver outputs that are financially correct, source-backed, and safe to act on.
• Crafting the interfaces owners use to review performance, investigate recommendations, and approve actions.
• Building DevOps (CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and deployments) to support rapid iteration with early customers.

You're a fit for our team if

• You can take an ambiguous problem from a customer conversation to production, making the hard tradeoffs while holding quality and speed. You can come in cold, learn what you need to in days, and deliver on a customer mandate.
• You aggressively use AI development tools like Codex or Claude Code while maintaining strong standards for testing, observability, and maintainability.
• You can adapt quickly to changing environments. We are a growing startup!
• You are full-stack, with production-level knowledge of modern frameworks (React, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS).
• 3+ years experience building full stack applications.
• You jive with our culture (see below).
• Bonus: you've worked at a startup before, have experience shipping LLM-based systems, or have touched real estate in personal or professional endeavors.

Our culture

• Intentionality: We believe we have the agency to engineer our own destiny as a team, and as individuals, through thoughtful planning.
• Ownership: We love being our own boss. Pros: flexibility; no one will tell you what to do. Con: no one will tell you what to do.
• Relentless optimism: We believe every problem has a solution; we just haven't found it yet.
• Customer delight: We make fans, not just customers.