Staff AI Engineer: Permitting Intelligence & AI Platforms

Pulley; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Hybrid in-office 4 days a week

Job summary

Pulley, based in San Francisco, is seeking a staff-level AI engineer to build the intelligence behind our permitting platform. You will transform messy inputs—plans, codes, reviewer comments—into fast, structured outputs and own end-to-end AI direction.

You will ship agent-driven features, design robust evals, and mentor engineers while shaping scalable systems for next-year roadmaps.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a substantial portion building production LLM or ML systems.
• Track record of owning a significant AI domain end-to-end: from “this is somebody’s problem” through architecture, delivery, and production ownership, including the unglamorous parts—data quality, eval design, cost and latency, failure handling
• Deep hands-on experience with large language models in production—prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, tool use and agentic workflows, and knowing when each is the wrong tool
• Experience designing evals and otherwise making LLM-powered features reliable in production
• Real experience building with AI coding agents—not just autocomplete; you’ve shipped work where agents did substantial implementation under your direction
• Ability to architect durable systems while making pragmatic tradeoffs
• Experience mentoring engineers or setting technical direction that other engineers built within
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and willing to work in person 4 days a week

Responsibilities

• Own the AI problem space, not just features—define the technical direction for how Pulley applies LLMs across multiple product surfaces, and carry it from ambiguity through architecture to shipped, iterated-on product
• Turn unstructured permitting documents, city regulations, and jurisdiction workflows into structured, reliable outputs—extraction, classification, retrieval, and agentic workflows over documents that were never designed to be machine-readable
• Set the evaluation and observability standard for the company: decide how we define ground truth, measure quality and regressions, and know when a model change is actually an improvement—and build the systems that make that the default for every team shipping LLM features
• Build with AI agents as a daily practice—directing, reviewing, and shipping agent-driven work at high velocity while owning the quality bar
• Make the technical bets that determine what Pulley can build next year, not just this quarter—which models, which architectures, what we build versus buy—and own the consequences of those bets in production
• Multiply the engineers around you: set the patterns others build LLM features within, mentor senior engineers toward larger scope, and make the whole team faster through the systems, standards, and abstractions you create

Skills

LLM systems

Production ML

AI engineering

Mentoring engineers

System architecture

Ownership

In-person SF

Tools

TypeScript

React

Google Cloud

Job description

Pulley, based in San Francisco, is seeking a staff-level AI engineer to build the intelligence behind our permitting platform. You will transform messy inputs—plans, codes, reviewer comments—into fast, structured outputs and own end-to-end AI direction.

You will ship agent-driven features, design robust evals, and mentor engineers while shaping scalable systems for next-year roadmaps.