Founding AI/ML Engineer

Location: Philadelphia, PA

• New York City, NY
• Washington, DC corridor (Remote-first with Philadelphia hub) Compensation: $175,000 – $240,000 base + meaningful early-employee equity Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, F-1, OPT, and STEM OPT supported Experience Level: 6+ years Employment Type: Full-Time
  
  
  

About Guthrie AI

Guthrie AI is building the AI-powered workflow layer for one of the world's largest industries: construction. Headquartered in Philadelphia with a remote-first team and a newly opened Philly hub office, the company has approximately $2M ARR on its core product and recently closed a seed round — with plans to grow revenue 10x over the next 12 months. Construction has resisted meaningful software innovation for more than 15 years, particularly among subcontractors. Guthrie believes agents and multimodal AI are the first technologies capable of fundamentally transforming how construction teams operate.

About The Role

Guthrie is hiring a Founding AI/ML Engineer to architect and ship production-grade AI systems that solve real customer problems. This is not a research role or a demo-focused position. The company is looking for product-minded engineers who can build reliable AI workflows used daily by customers. The role reports directly to the Chief AI Officer and works closely with founders and customers.

What You'll Own

• Build and ship production-grade AI systems used by real customers
• Design multimodal pipelines for drawings, specifications, and construction documents
• Build agentic workflows that automate document intake, extraction, takeoff support, bid preparation, and QA
• Build and improve retrieval systems, evaluation systems, and orchestration layers
• Improve model quality, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency
• Prototype and iterate on customer-facing AI features
• Own systems end to end from experimentation through deployment

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• Help shape engineering culture and technical direction
  
  
  

Requirements

• 6+ years of engineering experience including experience at an early-stage startup
• Production AI/ML systems deployed to real customers
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, computer vision, segmentation models, or applied ML systems
• Retrieval experience — embeddings, reranking, chunking, knowledge bases, and source-grounded answers
• Agentic workflow experience — tools, APIs, state management, retries, guardrails, and observability
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals — APIs, async processing, queues, databases, cloud deployment, and monitoring
• End-to-end ownership from problem definition through deployment
  
  
  

Nice to Have

• Construction, AEC, glazing, curtain wall, or architectural metals experience
• Multimodal AI, OCR, document intelligence, or computer vision background

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• Experience converting human-operated workflows into products
• Inference optimization or evaluation systems experience
  
  
  

This Role Is NOT For

• Research-focused candidates without production deployment experience
• Demo-only builders without customer-facing systems
• Engineers who over-rely on AI tools without strong architectural judgment
• Consumer-only or developer-tool backgrounds without enterprise software experience
  
  
  

Benefits

• Employer-funded health insurance through Patch
• Team stipend and meal stipend
• Meaningful early-employee equity grant
  
  
  

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Interview Process

• Initial screen (30-minute hiring manager interview)
• Getting-to-know-you round with product leadership, co-founders, and CEO
• :2-hour technical / architecture round
• Optional on-site visit to Philadelphia office
• Offer
  
  
  

Logistics

• Remote-first — Philadelphia / New York / Washington DC corridor preferred
• Philadelphia hub office available
• H-1B, F-1, OPT, and STEM OPT visa sponsorship available
  
  
  

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Guthrie AI.