Founding Applied AI Engineer

Alkali streamlines chemical project workflows for engineering teams with error checking and equipment procurement utilizing AI.

Location: Remote
Company size: 1–10
Posted: 4w ago
Via: Yc

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Job listing · Updated 21 AUG 2026

Founding Applied AI Engineer

Alkali Engineering· New York, NY, USView company profile

Job title: Founding Applied AI Engineer
Job location: New York, NY, US
Job listing URL: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/alkali/jobs/3iTB9w5-founding-applied-ai-engineer
Job description: ### **About Alkali** Alkali is an AI-native price estimation and 3D-modeling platform for construction. **We’re changing how construction projects are built in the U.S.** Today, steel fabricators estimate the price of multimillion-dollar projects by reviewing paper blueprints with a highlighter. Alkali uses computer vision, VLMs, and agents to produce faster, more accurate estimates. Each month, steel fabricators across the United States use Alkali to estimate hundreds of projects covering millions of pounds of steel. **By volume, more than \~10% of U.S. structural steel flows through our platform.** ### **About the Role** We are hiring a founding AI engineer to help own Alkali’s core AI systems. You will develop and optimize: • **Vision Models:** Improve vision models to extract quantities, sizes, quantities, text, etc from engineering drawings. **• Agents:** Build agents that navigate large plan sets, use specialized tools, and complete complex estimating and engineering workflows. **• Data and Evaluation Pipelines:** Develop the datasets, pipelines, and harnesses to optimize system performance and understand failures. ### About You You have: • Trained and evaluated computer vision models • Designed data schemas and labeling ontologies • Built and maintained large-scale data and model pipelines • Built and evaluated agents with complex tool sets • The ability to take ownership outside your existing specialty and quickly learn unfamiliar domains, including engineering drawings and construction workflows ### Why Alkali You will work with unusually rich visual and geometric data, help shape Alkali’s technical direction, and build systems that influence how physical infrastructure gets priced and built. Plus the team is pretty cool!

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