Principal Software Engineer, AI

About the role

PermitFlow is redefining how America builds. We’re an applied AI company serving the nation’s builders, tackling one of the largest information challenges in the economy: understanding what can be built, where, and how. Our AI agent workforce helps the fastest-growing construction companies navigate everything from permitting and licensing to inspections and project closeouts – accelerating housing, clean-energy, and infrastructure development across the country.

Despite being a $1.6T industry, construction still suffers from massive delays, wasted capital, and lost opportunity. PermitFlow has already delivered unprecedented speed, accuracy, and visibility to over $20B in development, helping contractors reduce compliance time, de-risk projects, and scale with confidence.

As the U.S. enters a new capex supercycle across data centers, factories, housing, and renewables, joining PermitFlow means building the AI infrastructure at the core of every construction project driving the next wave of reindustrialization.

We’ve raised over $90M, most recently completing our Series B, https://www.permitflow.com/blog/permitflow-series-b from top-tier investors including Accel, Kleiner Perkins https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401703305569275904/, Initialized, Y Combinator, Felicis, and Altos Ventures, with backing from leaders at OpenAI, Google, Procore, ServiceTitan, Zillow, PlanGrid, and Uber.

Our HQ is in New York City with a hybrid schedule (3 in-office days per week). We prefer NYC-based candidates or those open to relocation.

ROLE OVERVIEW

We're hiring a Staff/Principal Engineer to build PermitFlow's core product AI Assistant, infrastructure, and workflow agents. This is a role that will require UX and technical acumen to deliver high quality agents in a genuinely complex domain, while also up-leveling our core agentic infrastructure and data flywheel.

Submitting a permit means comprehending construction documents, extracting project details, confirming every requirement has been met and often filling in pdf forms. Errors compound across steps and a failed submission adds real cost for our customers as projects slow.

The ideal candidate will mix an exceptional history of product delivery with true experience building AI and Agentic infrastructure from the ground up. You ship quickly, instrument everything, hold a high quality bar, and stay close to the users of what you build.

This role reports directly to our VP of Engineering. We're hiring at Staff or Principal, with the level based on past experience and interview performance.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Own the agent architecture. Design the reasoning loop, planning and decomposition strategy, state and session model, and recovery behavior for long-running tasks.

- Build the context layer. Retrieval, memory, and context-window management over project documents, jurisdictional requirements, prior submissions, and customer-specific conventions.