Principal AI Product Architect at Pre-IPO Proptech

Pacaso; United States; Remote; USD 198,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Remote-friendly

Home office stipend

Job summary

Pacaso, a US-based company, is hiring a principal-level AI product IC to architect an end-to-end customer system that unites product management, AI architecture, and growth engineering. You will prototype with AI tooling and lead engineering and data teams to production.

This is not a traditional PM or pure engineering role; it sits at the intersection of product and technical leadership. The compensation is around $220,000 base with equity, with ownership and autonomy emphasized.

Qualifications

• High-level AI system design experience.
• Ability to prototype AI-driven solutions end-to-end.
• Comfort turning product ideas into tangible AI-enabled systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect end-to-end AI-powered customer system.
• Define data, identity, scoring, and action pipelines.
• Prototype with AI tooling and drive productionization with Eng/Data teams.

Skills

AI architecture

Identity across channels

Prototyping with AI

Production guardrails

Tools

AI tooling

Cloud infra

Job description

Principal AI Product Architect at Pre-IPO Proptech in Providence

This is a genuinely rare role — a principal-level IC position that sits at the intersection of product management, AI systems architecture, and growth engineering. It's not a traditional PM job, and it's not a pure engineering role. For the right candidate, it's an opportunity to define an emerging job category.

Compensation context: The ~$220,000 base with equity is competitive for a principal IC in the proptech/startup space, though it may sit slightly below top-of-market for equivalent principal PMs or staff engineers at FAANG or late-stage unicorns ($250K–$350K+ total comp). The equity component matters significantly here given Pacaso's Nasdaq listing ambition (ticker: PCSO) — there's real upside if the IPO materializes.

• End-to-end agentic AI system design — one of the hottest and most transferable skills in 2025
• Customer data platform (CDP) architecture and cross-channel identity resolution
• Next-best-action decisioning and ML-adjacent scoring systems
• AI evaluation frameworks and production guardrails — increasingly required for senior AI roles

Green flags: Genuine ownership, weekly shipping cadence, strong culture awards, pre-IPO equity, and AI-first product culture. The role explicitly says "no roadmap management" — a signal of real autonomy.

Red flags to consider: The data stack is fragmented today ("pieces that don't talk to each other"), and the scope is very broad for a solo IC. This is a high-ambiguity, high-accountability role — rewarding for self-starters, potentially stressful for those who prefer defined scope.

Career trajectory: Success here positions you as a credible AI product architect in proptech, luxury tech, or any high-consideration B2C vertical — a niche with growing demand.

Pacaso exists to enrich lives by making second home ownership possible and enjoyable for more people. We've reimagined the second home category — pairing a thoughtfully designed co-ownership model with simplified financials, equitable scheduling, and dedicated local property management, so owners get the joy of a true second home without the hassle.

Since launch, Pacaso has facilitated more than $1.2 billion in gross real estate transactions and service fees across 40+ destinations in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe — including Aspen, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Malibu, Palm Springs, Cabo, Paris, London, and most recently Florence, Milan, and Rome. We've raised over $300 million in cumulative equity funding, closed the largest real estate Regulation A+ offering of 2025, and reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO as we build toward a public listing.

Our work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, CNBC, Bloomberg, and others.

Recognition

We're a Certified Great Place to Work and have been honored for both our culture and our category-defining work:

• No. 5, Forbes America's Best Startup Employers (2026) — our second consecutive Top 10 ranking
• Newsweek's America’s Greatest Startup Workplaces (2025)
• Winner, 2025 Inman Best of Proptech Awards — Consumer Experience & Marketplace Innovation
• Fortune & Great Place To Work Best Workplaces in Real Estate (2024)
• Best Workplace in the Bay Area™ (2023)
• LinkedIn Top Startup (2022) · Glassdoor Best Places to Work, #6 (2022)

The Role

Pacaso buyers are high-net-worth individuals making a considered purchase over months, sometimes years. They move between our site, email, messaging, and our Sales team, and today each of those runs on its own tools with its own picture of the customer. We believe one personalized system that follows each customer from first interest to purchase — and keeps serving them as an owner — will shorten the path to purchase and make our growth product-led.

We're hiring a principal-level technical product IC to architect that system and own its outcome. You'll define the reference architecture: how we recognize a customer across channels, what we know about them, how the system decides what to do next, and which of those decisions AI agents can make without a person. You'll prove the design with working prototypes you build yourself with AI tooling, then lead Engineering and Data in taking it to production.

This isn't a roadmap-and-backlog PM role, and it isn't a full-time production engineering role. It sits between them. You'll make product calls with Sales, Marketing, and leadership, make architecture calls with senior engineers, and be accountable for both.

Some of this is already moving. AI agents talk to our customers today, and parts of the data and decisioning exist. None of it runs end to end on its own yet. You'll take what's there, decide what to keep, and design the system that can.

What You'll Own

• The architecture of the customer system. One design for new leads, dormant leads, and stalled buyers first, then owners who add a share, so the same person is served by one system instead of separate tools for each stage. You write the architecture and the decisions behind it, and other teams build against it.
• The customer intelligence layer. Identity across channels, the event and signal model, shared memory and context, scoring, eligibility and frequency caps, and the next-best-action logic that decides what happens next.
• Agent and workflow design. Which agents exist, what each one is allowed to decide, how they hand off to each other and to Sales, and the prompts, tools, and orchestration behind them.
• Trust and reliability. Evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, cost and latency budgets, and kill switches, in place before anything reaches a customer.
• The path to autonomy. What the system decides on its own, what still needs a person, and the evidence we need before we take that person out of the loop.
• Technical direction across teams. Build-versus-buy calls, data contracts with Engineering and Data, and integration standards for the CRM, messaging, email, and the site.
• The outcome. Funnel velocity (time from first interest to high intent, and to purchase) and the measured lift in qualified actions and closed sales.

Two examples of the work:

• An AI agent engages a new lead in the channel they prefer, qualifies them, and hands them to Sales at the right moment with the context Sales needs to close.
• A customer reads an email, chats with us, and comes back to the site a week later. They get one continuous experience, because the system remembers what we've already said and done.

Who You Are

• Customer-obsessed. You start from the customer's experience, not the org chart or the backlog. When you have to choose between channels, surfaces, or features, the tiebreaker is what improves that experience. Our customers value clarity and discretion, and you design for both.
• An architect who still builds. You've designed systems other teams build on, and you still prototype yourself. You're expert at getting AI to do real work through prompting, tool use, and orchestration.
• Technically deep. You can read a data model, challenge an integration design, reason about latency, cost, and failure modes, and hold your own with senior engineers on how something should be built.
• Rigorous about autonomy. You design systems to run on their own, and you know how to prove they're ready. Evals and guardrails go in before launch, not after an incident.
• Accountable for outcomes. You measure yourself on results, not tasks shipped. You've stopped your own work when the impact wasn't there, and you can tell us about it.
• Fluent in business and technical. You can frame and defend a tradeoff with Sales, Marketing, and leadership, then go deep with engineers on the build. You own the decision in both conversations.
• A multiplier. You raise the bar for how Product, Engineering, and Data build with AI, through your designs, your reviews, and the patterns you leave behind.
• A partner. Marketing and Sales are core stakeholders, and you'll co-own the buyer journey with our product owner for new-lead acquisition. When the path to impact runs through another team's area, you work with the owner to move it.
• Fast at context. You go deep on systems you didn't build and turn a lot of information into a plan quickly.

What You'll Bring

We'll ask for specific evidence of each of these. If you can't point to all five, this probably isn't the right fit yet.

• Customer obsession. You take customer insights and translate them into real product features that deliver results.
• A production agentic system. You've designed and shipped an autonomous or agentic system that runs end to end with minimal human intervention. You can show us what it decides on its own and how you knew it was making the right calls before you trusted it with real customers.
• A measurable growth outcome. You've owned a growth, conversion, lifecycle, or re-engagement result. You can give us the baseline, what you changed, the lift, the time frame, and how you knew your work caused it.
• Decisioning and intelligence layers. You've designed signals, identity, scoring, context, eligibility and caps, or next-best-action logic.
• Prototype to production. You've built working prototypes yourself with AI tooling, beyond specs and slides, and taken at least one to production with engineers. You can tell us what you owned and what they owned.
• Architecture others built on. You've been the architect of a system that multiple teams built on or integrated with, and you made the core technical calls: data model, integration pattern, build versus buy.

Nice to have:

• Experience with long-consideration, high-value purchases such as real estate, luxury, or financial services.
• Experience putting AI into a human sales team's workflow, including CRM integration.
• An earlier career as a software engineer, data architect, or solutions architect.

This Role Isn't for You If

• You want to manage a roadmap and backlog, or execute against a defined spec.
• You want to manage a team right now. This is a principal IC role.
• You'd rather be a production software engineer full time.
• You see this as an email or campaign program, or measure success in opens, clicks, or campaigns shipped.
• Your AI experience is mostly using it to write docs and emails faster.
• You need a full team and a clean data stack before you start. Some pieces exist today and don't talk to each other yet.

How We Work

We start with AI. It's one of our core values. We design processes with automation and intelligence in mind from the start, and our product team already has AI agents talking to customers.

Small team, real ownership. Product at Pacaso works closely with Engineering, Design, Data, Sales, and Marketing. If you see a problem worth solving, you're trusted to solve it. We ship weekly and demo working software, not slides.

We move fast and play the long game. We make decisions and change course quickly. "Embrace an infinite mindset" is one of our values: a quarterly number is information, not a verdict, and we'd rather send nothing than send the wrong thing.

We pick up the phone and empty the dishwasher. When async isn't enough, we get on a call. No task is beneath anyone, and we keep bureaucracy to a minimum. We're a distributed Crew.

Compensation

• Around $220,000 with equity

Why You’ll Love Working Here

We invest in our Crew the way we invest in our homes — thoughtfully, generously, and with care.

• Competitive base salary and meaningful equity — every Crew member shares in what we're building
• Discretionary time off — take the rest you need, when you need it
• Premium medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family
• Sponsored memberships to One Medical, Peloton, and WellHub for whole-person, modern healthcare
• 401(k) to help you build long-term security
• Paid parental leave for primary and secondary caregivers
• Home office stipend and a monthly internet and cell phone reimbursement to set you up for great remote work
• Quarterly team gatherings and ongoing learning and development investment

Our Commitment

Pacaso is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, ability, and background — including veterans and individuals with disabilities. We believe a Crew as diverse as the owners we serve makes Pacaso stronger, and we're committed to building a workplace where every voice belongs.

Is this role fully remote or does it require office presence? This is a fully remote role for US-based candidates. Pacaso describes itself as a distributed team and provides a home office stipend plus internet/phone reimbursement. There are quarterly in-person team gatherings, so some travel is expected. What is the compensation for this role? The listed compensation is around $220,000 with equity. Every Crew member receives equity, which is especially notable given Pacaso has reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO and is building toward a public listing. Is this a people management role or an individual contributor position? This is explicitly a principal-level individual contributor (IC) role. The job posting notes it is not a team management position right now, though you will provide technical direction across Engineering, Data, and Product teams. What level of AI experience is required for this role? You need demonstrated experience designing and shipping production agentic or autonomous AI systems — not just using AI for productivity. The role requires hands‑on prototyping with AI tooling, plus experience with prompting, orchestration, and AI evaluation frameworks. Is this role open to candidates outside the United States? Based on the job posting, this role is US-only. Pacaso is headquartered in the United States and the location hint specifies USA Only.

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