Sr. Research Engineer

The posting, as Prophetic Technologies Inc wrote it

Prophetic Software is not able to sponsor employment visas now or in the future. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship to be considered for this role.

About Prophetic

Real estate development is a multi-billion-dollar industry that has run on fragmented data, manual processes, and gut instinct for decades. Prophetic is changing that. We're building the AI-native platform that enables homebuilders, developers, and investors to find, analyze, and act on land opportunities from a single system — powered by proprietary technologies that process billions of data points across all 50 states. We are the market leader in our space, and our customers don't just use the product — they love it. We're not making teams more efficient. We're changing how they operate.

Prophetic is scaling fast — demand is outpacing our ability to hire, and we're just getting started. This is a once-in-a-lifetime team: sharp, low ego, deeply collaborative, and obsessed with building the best product in the industry. Come disrupt an industry with us.

About the Role

You'll work directly with our 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 is not a pure research role; you ship production code that runs nationally.

Your work spans agentic systems and pipelines, harness engineering, data engineering, and machine learning applications. You'll build the systems that turn messy public records (zoning ordinances, council minutes, assessor and recorder files, permits, parcel geometry, etc.) into answers a land team can act on in seconds.

This is a high-bar, PhD-level (or equivalent) role. You'll operate at the intersection of research and production engineering, turning cutting-edge AI into shipped product features.

What You'll Do

• Build and improve the AI systems powering SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap.
• SearchAI finds the parcels in a market that can actually support what you want to build.
• ZoneAI reads municipal zoning ordinances nationwide and turns them into structured, parcel-level buildability rules.
• SiteAI generates road and lot layouts on a real parcel and reports how many homes it will actually yield.
• CouncilAI harvests city council and planning commission agendas and minutes to surface development and entitlement activity as it happens.
• DevMap detects and attributes residential development nationwide, with lot, builder, and
• 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 our evals team to build the ground-truth and benchmark sets, then use them to drive real accuracy gains on extraction and inference.
• Scale inference and data processing: throu

[…]
ity. Remote, hybrid, or in-office with a great Portland, OR headquarters.

• Self-starters who thrive in ambiguity. We're a startup. If you need someone to tell you what to do every morning, this isn't the place; if you come alive solving hard problems with smart people, it is.

Benefits (US-based Full-time)

• 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

How We Work

These four themes are how we think, build, and lead:

• Truth — Say the hard thing. We speak plainly, flag problems early, and share what's actually going on.
• Precision — Sign your name to it. Our customers make million-dollar decisions on our data. We get the details right.
• Velocity — Speed compounds. Waiting doesn't. We ship daily and launch features every two to three weeks.
• Ownership — Own it, then solve it. We own outcomes, not tasks. If something's broken, we fix it.

EEO

Prophetic Software is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and applicants, and we make employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran or military status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law. We actively seek to build a diverse team and encourage candidates from underrepresented backgrounds to apply. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request for qualified individuals with disabilities throughout the application and employment process.