Founding Engineer

Getting a data center, solar farm, or factory approved takes years of jurisdiction research, due diligence, and permitting work that still runs on slow, hourly consulting. PermitPortal replaces that with software: quantified jurisdiction risk scores, AI-driven due diligence, entitlement timelines, and automated permitting workflows. Our agents monitor regulatory and political activity across the US so our customers' intelligence is always current.

We build for the projects that move the economy. We are backed by Y Combinator and already working with some of the largest data center developers in the world.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you own product end to end, working directly with the founders on direction and the technical roadmap. We are looking for someone who sees a problem and fixes it without waiting to be told, someone who takes an ambiguous goal and turns it into shipped product.

Much of the work centers on AI: building systems that reason like an expert and act inside the product, not just chat. It is some of the hardest and most important work we do.

What you'll do

• Ship full-stack features across maps, dashboards, AI chat, and workspace views
• Push our AI forward: tool use, retrieval, memory, evals, and the guardrails that keep it trustworthy
• Build the pipelines that score jurisdictions, generate due diligence, and detect regulatory signals
• Set the engineering bar: data models, APIs, CI/CD, and observability
• Talk to customers, scope the problem, ship the fix

Our Stack

• Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, interactive maps
• Backend: Supabase (Postgres, auth, realtime, storage), agentic pipelines
• AI: Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI, and other providers for research, extraction, and scoring
• Infra: Cloud-hosted, CI/CD and observability as first-class concerns

What we're looking for

• Strong fundamentals and fluency in a modern language (TypeScript, Python, Go, or similar)
• A track record shipping production web apps across the full stack
• A bias toward action: you thrive in ambiguity, take initiative, and drive projects to done without hand-holding
• Solid grasp of data modeling, databases, and scalable APIs

Bonus

• Experience with AI agents, LLM pipelines, or retrieval systems
• Familiarity with geospatial data, real estate, permitting, or regulatory tech

Compensation

• $75K–$120K plus 0.2%–0.8% equity