Sr. Research Engineer

Prophetic; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Unlimited PTO

Hybrid/Remote stipend

Office snacks and perks

Team meetups

Job summary

Prophetic is seeking a PhD-level or equivalent AI/ML engineer to work with the Chief AI Officer on the AI core of our platform. You will ship production code that runs nationwide, turning messy public records into fast, actionable insights for land teams.

You will work across agentic systems, data pipelines, and ML applications, collaborating with engineering, data teams, and product to drive accuracy and scale across 50 states.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, ML, or related quantitative field or equivalent industry depth.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems.
• Strong systems engineering: data pipelines, orchestration, agentic systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve AI systems powering SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap.
• Design agentic harnesses to crawl and extract from thousands of municipal and county sources.
• Scale inference and data processing across national runs with hundreds of millions of records.
• Ship production-quality code in pipelines and services and integrate research outputs.
• Collaborate with engineering and product on architecture decisions and feature prioritization.
• Evaluate and integrate new AI capabilities as the field evolves.

Skills

PhD in Computer Science

5+ years software engineering

LLM in production

Python proficiency

Data pipelines

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PostGIS

Job description

Prophetic Software is not able to sponsor employment visas now or in the future. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship to be considered for this role.

About Prophetic

Real estate development is a multi-billion-dollar industry that has run on fragmented data, manual processes, and gut instinct for decades. Prophetic is changing that. We're building the AI-native platform that enables homebuilders, developers, and investors to find, analyze, and act on land opportunities from a single system - powered by proprietary technologies that process billions of data points across all 50 states. We are the market leader in our space, and our customers don't just use the product - they love it. We're not making teams more efficient. We're changing how they operate.

About The Role

You'll work directly with our Chief AI Officer on the AI core of Prophetic's platform. The research team builds the pipelines, models, and intelligence that power SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap. This is not a pure research role; you ship production code that runs nationally.

Your work spans agentic systems and pipelines, harness engineering, data engineering, and machine learning applications. You'll build the systems that turn messy public records (zoning ordinances, council minutes, assessor and recorder files, permits, parcel geometry, etc.) into answers a land team can act on in seconds.

This is a high-bar, PhD-level (or equivalent) role. You'll operate at the intersection of research and production engineering, turning cutting-edge AI into shipped product features.

What You'll Do

• Build and improve the AI systems powering SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap.
  • SearchAI finds the parcels in a market that can actually support what you want to build.
  • ZoneAI reads municipal zoning ordinances nationwide and turns them into structured, parcel-level buildability rules.
  • SiteAI generates road and lot layouts on a real parcel and reports how many homes it will actually yield.
  • CouncilAI harvests city council and planning commission agendas and minutes to surface development and entitlement activity as it happens.
  • DevMap detects and attributes residential development nationwide, with lot, builder, and
• Design agentic harnesses that discover, crawl, and extract from thousands of municipal and county sources, then make them code-driven, efficient, and reliable enough to run nationwide.
• Work with our evals team to build the ground-truth and benchmark sets, then use them to drive real accuracy gains on extraction and inference.
• Scale inference and data processing: throughput, cost, and failure handling across national runs over hundreds of millions of records.
• Work with geospatial data at scale: parcel geometry, zoning, topography, and market data permitting across all 50 states.
• Ship production-quality code in our pipelines and services, and integrate research outputs into the platform.
• Collaborate with engineering on architecture decisions and with product on feature prioritization.
• Evaluate and integrate new AI capabilities as the field evolves.

What You Need

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field - or equivalent depth built in industry.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems.
• Strong systems engineering: data pipelines, orchestration, and agentic systems running in production.
• Experience scaling large systems around model inference and data processing - throughput limits, cost control, batch orchestration, and what breaks at hundreds of millions of rows.
• Deep, hands-on experience with LLMs in production, including prompt and context engineering and evaluation.
• Strong Python skills and comfort owning your own deployments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with geospatial data (PostGIS, spatial analysis, satellite imagery).
• Experience with optimization or computational geometry.
• 2+ years at an early-stage startup.
• Background in proptech or real estate data.

Why Prophetic

• The team. Wide expertise, sharp, low ego, and genuinely fun to work with. We have each other's backs and we celebrate wins together.
• Real ownership and impact from day one. Our customers make million-dollar decisions on our platform. Your work matters immediately.
• AI-native product and AI-native workflows. Every team - engineering, sales, operations - runs on AI tooling daily.
• Founder-led transparency. Leadership shares the financials, the strategy, and the hard calls with the whole team.
• High growth, high demand. The product works, customers love it, and we are hiring to keep up. No shortage of opportunity here.
• Flexibility. Remote, hybrid, or in-office with a great Portland, OR headquarters.
• Self-starters who thrive in ambiguity. We're a startup. If you need someone to tell you what to do every morning, this isn't the place; if you come alive solving hard problems with smart people, it is.

Benefits (US-based Full-time)

• 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you; 30% coverage for dependents
• Competitive salary and meaningful early-stage equity
• Unlimited PTO
• Hybrid/Remote stipend
• In-office perks: snacks, drinks, coffee, ping-pong table, and more - plus cuddles from Olive, our in-office Doberman!
• Budget for intra-office travel
• 2-3 annual team meetups in person

How We Work

• Truth - Say the hard thing. We speak plainly, flag problems early, and share what's actually going on.
• Precision - Sign your name to it. Our customers make million-dollar decisions on our data. We get the details right.
• Velocity - Speed compounds. Waiting doesn't. We ship daily and launch features every two to three weeks.
• Ownership - Own it, then solve it. We own outcomes, not tasks. If something's broken, we fix it.

Eeo

Prophetic Software is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and applicants, and we make employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran or military status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law. We actively seek to build a diverse team and encourage candidates from underrepresented backgrounds to apply. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request for qualified individuals with disabilities throughout the application and employment process.