Founding Software Engineer

Flotive AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Flotive AI is hiring a Founding Software Engineer to build AI-powered regulatory intelligence at scale. You will ingest regulations, extract structured knowledge, and craft verifiable workflows backed by primary sources.

You will work with the co-founders and engineers to own the system architecture, focusing on retrieval, knowledge representation, geospatial reasoning, and customer-facing decision workflows.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience designing and owning production systems.
• Experience designing search systems using GraphQL/REST.
• Experience building AI agents or agentic workflows.
• Production APIs and services using modern Python frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Build pipelines that ingest and monitor regulatory changes across multiple government levels.
• Create structured permitting workflows translating regulations into steps and pathways.
• Develop AI workflows to extract and explain knowledge from regulatory texts.
• Develop APIs connecting regulatory intelligence to mapping and workflow products.
• Handle processing of large geospatial and regulatory datasets efficiently.
• Make architecture decisions balancing speed and future-proofing.

Skills

Ownership of production systems

Search system design

API design

AI agent workflows

Cloud deployment

Tools

GraphQL

REST APIs

PostgreSQL

LangGraph

LangChain

Job description

A solar farm sits dead for eight months because someone missed a county setback ordinance buried on page 340 of a zoning code. A transmission line gets rerouted, at a cost of millions, because an environmental filing cited the wrong watershed. A data center waits months for power because a utility and developer are working from different versions of the interconnection rules.

This isn't an engineering problem or a capital problem. It's an information problem. The rules that decide whether America gets built are scattered across thousands of agencies and millions of pages of regulatory text. Searching, cross-referencing, and verification has been a manual process, becoming the primary determinants of how long it takes for a project to get built.

Flotive fixes that. We build AI systems that continuously ingest regulations, technical standards, permitting requirements, and agency guidance; understand how they relate to specific projects and locations; and produce verifiable, explainable answers backed by primary sources. Our customers spend less time searching for requirements and more time designing, permitting, and building. We’re starting with power projects, but our work has the potential to have far reaching impacts on all types of developments- from housing to mining.

About Flotive AI

A solar farm sits dead for eight months because someone missed a county setback ordinance buried on page 340 of a zoning code. A transmission line gets rerouted, at a cost of millions, because an environmental filing cited the wrong watershed. A data center waits months for power because a utility and developer are working from different versions of the interconnection rules.

This isn't an engineering problem or a capital problem. It's an information problem. The rules that decide whether America gets built are scattered across thousands of agencies and millions of pages of regulatory text. Searching, cross-referencing, and verification has been a manual process, becoming the primary determinants of how long it takes for a project to get built.

Flotive fixes that. We build AI systems that continuously ingest regulations, technical standards, permitting requirements, and agency guidance; understand how they relate to specific projects and locations; and produce verifiable, explainable answers backed by primary sources. Our customers spend less time searching for requirements and more time designing, permitting, and building. We’re starting with power projects, but our work has the potential to have far reaching impacts on all types of developments- from housing to mining.

Our mission is simple:

Help society build and run infrastructure while maintaining the highest standards of safety, environmental stewardship, and regulatory compliance.

We believe better information and workflows, not weaker regulation, is the fastest path to building the infrastructure society needs. By reducing the time and cost of regulatory compliance, we can accelerate projects while improving transparency, consistency, and trust in the process.

About the role

As a Founding Software Engineer at Flotive, you will work closely with the co-founders (Francis and Akshay), other engineers, and subject matter experts to understand customer requirements, and own and make decisions on technical architecture before anyone else gets hired to weigh in on them. an always up-to-date decision-making framework that leverages verifiable AI grounded in regulatory documents and other authoritative sources.

The technical core of this job is building a system that ingests regulatory documents at scale, extracts structured knowledge from them, tracks geographic and jurisdictional context, and produces workflows that customer can trust and verify. That means real problems in retrieval, processing, knowledge representation, geospatial reasoning, and customer-facing decision workflows, not CRUD endpoints wrapped around a database.

This is a high ownership role on a small but elite team, where your decisions will directly shape the customer experience and the company.

What you will do

• Build pipelines that discover, ingest, classify, and monitor regulatory changes across federal, state, and local governments
• Create structured permitting workflows that translate regulatory requirements into clear steps, decision points, dependencies, and permit pathways
• AI workflows that pull structured, explainable knowledge out of dense regulatory text and make them actionable
• APIs connecting that regulatory intelligence to our mapping and workflow product
• Systems for processing large geospatial and regulatory datasets efficiently
• Architecture decisions that balance moving fast now against not painting ourselves into a corner later

What we are looking for

• 4+ years of experience as a software engineer with significant ownership over production systems for enterprise or consumer software.
• Experience designing search systems and working with GraphQL, REST APIs.
• Experience building AI agents, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered automation systems using tools such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Assistants/Responses API, or similar frameworks
• Experience building production APIs and services using modern Python frameworks.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and databases
• Comfort working with building and operating on large datasets. GIS experience is helpful but not required
• Experience deploying and operating production services in cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, GCP, Render, Vercel, or similar platforms
• Familiarity with containers, CI/CD, observability, and the operational practices needed to keep production systems reliable
• Embodies a startup mentality, demonstrates ownership, and effectively balances high-quality output with a keen sense of urgency

Nice to have

• Experience with spatial indexing or mapping frameworks.
• Exposure to infrastructure, energy, environmental permitting, utilities, or regulatory workflows.
• Prior experience at high-growth startups or on founding engineering teams or fast-moving 0-to-1 product environments.

Compensation

$150,000 to $180,000 base salary, plus equity.

Our compensation packages include competitive base salary, meaningful equity in the form of stock options, and benefits. Compensation varies based on experience, skill level, and role scope. Relocation assistance is available.

We believe equity is critical to long-term financial upside. As a founding engineer, you will have the option to trade some salary for above-market equity if desired.

Location

This role is in-person, based out of our Jersey City office. We may relocate to New York City depending on team needs in the future.