Sr. Research Engineer

Prophetic Technologies Inc

10d • Hybrid

About The Position

Prophetic Software is seeking a Sr. Research Engineer to work directly with their 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 role involves shipping production code that runs nationally, spanning agentic systems and pipelines, harness engineering, data engineering, and machine learning applications. The engineer will build systems that transform public records into actionable insights for land teams. This is a high-bar, PhD-level (or equivalent) role operating at the intersection of research and production engineering.

Requirements

• 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 Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the AI systems powering SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap.
• 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 the evals team to build 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 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.

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree