Founding AI Platform Engineer (Hands-On CTO Track)

Founding AI Platform Engineer

Hands-On CTO Track

Build the AI-enabled operating system for an emerging institutional finance category.

Our client is a New York City-based real estate capital company working to make Homebuilder Finance a repeatable, data-driven asset class.

Thousands of capable regional and local homebuilders need more efficient access to capital. Institutional investors want short-duration, collateralized residential credit exposure, but homebuilder loans remain fragmented, bespoke, inconsistently underwritten, and difficult to evaluate as a programmatic investment pool.

The company is building the standard that connects them: the data model, underwriting framework, governance, workflows, and operating infrastructure that allow institutional capital to evaluate, finance, monitor, and invest in Homebuilder Finance at scale.

A meaningful amount of the underlying technology and agent architecture is already operating. Real business needs—underwriting, financial models, investor materials, decisions, communications, and internal workflows—already enter the system and produce useful work.

The initial bootstrap is complete. Now the company needs a second builder.

You will work directly inside the codebase, extend the system, make it usable across the organization, and become the technical counterpart who can carry the product and systems vision forward without waiting for a fully specified roadmap.

What You Will Build

You will own work across full-stack product development, applied AI, data, infrastructure, and business operations.

Your work will directly affect how the company evaluates builders, underwrites transactions, matches opportunities with capital partners, creates investor materials, and learns across every builder and deal.

You will:

• Extend the production platform and agent architecture across builder intake, underwriting, capital matching, reporting, communications, and internal decision-making.
• Translate ambiguous, partially articulated operating problems into clear specifications and useful products.
• Build a common data layer connecting builder documentation, credit analysis, investment memoranda, capital-partner requirements, and persistent builder profiles.
• Design dependable workflows that combine deterministic software, AI, human judgment, approvals, and auditable override trails.
• Build full-stack tools that work for ordinary business users—not only for the technical people who created them.
• Own the production lifecycle from architecture and implementation through testing, deployment, observability, and iteration.
• Decide what should be built, bought, automated, kept manual, or governed by human review.
• Help establish the technical standards, architecture, and eventual engineering organization behind the platform.

This is not a conventional corporate IT role, a maintenance seat, or an executive position removed from the codebase. The mandate is to close the distance between messy business needs and dependable working systems.

What You Bring

You are an established but still deeply hands-on builder with:

• A substantial software engineering record, typically 10 or more years, including meaningful ownership of complex production systems.
• Deep full-stack experience, typically five or more years, spanning modern frontend development, backend systems, data, cloud infrastructure, and production operations.
• Strong experience with a modern frontend framework and JavaScript or TypeScript.
• Meaningful backend and systems depth, with the ability to reason across an entire production environment.
• Practical experience with deployment, observability, infrastructure, cloud systems, and DevOps.
• Evidence that you have personally designed, built, tested, shipped, operated, and materially evolved consequential production systems.
• Direct applied-AI experience—such as agent orchestration, LLM-powered products, AI-enabled internal tools, or serious development workflows using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or comparable tools.
• A realistic understanding of AI's limitations, failure modes, evaluation requirements, and appropriate role in production systems.
• Experience beyond a narrow engineering lane, such as founding a company or working closely with product, operations, finance, sales, clients, or another business-facing function.
• The agency to identify important gaps and act without waiting for someone to hand you a complete problem statement.

Years alone do not establish fit. Exceptional builders with a shorter career arc are encouraged when their work demonstrates unusual technical depth, architectural judgment, zero-to-one ownership, and sustained responsibility for important production systems.

Startup or similarly high-ownership experience is strongly preferred. Experience in lending, structured finance, capital markets, credit, real estate, or another operationally complex financial environment is valuable but not required.

How You Think

The strongest person for this role demonstrates:

• Systematic awareness: You diagnose the real problem, its users, and its failure modes before reaching for a solution.
• AI realism: You have built enough with modern AI to understand both its leverage and its limits.
• Translator/operator ability: You move fluently between technical architecture and how a business actually operates.
• Ownership: You do not require a mature roadmap, a large team, or perfectly specified tickets to make progress.
• Product judgment: You care about useful outcomes for real users, not technology for its own sake.

The CTO Track

This is not a ceremonial CTO title on day one. It begins with direct ownership of the product, architecture, and code.

As the platform and team grow—and as the person in this role demonstrates the ability to carry the technical mandate—the scope is designed to expand toward company-wide technical leadership. The path is based on demonstrated impact, judgment, and organizational leverage rather than tenure or title progression.

The right candidate wants both parts: the opportunity to shape the company's technical future and the responsibility to build the foundation personally.

Location

This role is based in New York City, with regular in-person work in Manhattan strongly preferred. Hybrid arrangements may be considered for an unusually aligned candidate.

Candidates outside NYC may be considered when the fit is exceptional and there is a credible path to spending meaningful time with the team in New York.

Compensation

The expected total compensation range is USD 200,000–250,000 Yearly.

Why Join Now

This is a rare chance to join after the initial system has cleared its bootstrap stage but before the most consequential products, workflows, and technical leverage have been built.

The platform already has real demand, real operating pressure, and real users. The next step is turning that foundation into durable infrastructure that can scale across the company—and eventually across an emerging asset class.

If selected for a video interview, be prepared to describe—and ideally demonstrate:

1. Something consequential you built before anyone formally asked you to build it.
2. An applied-AI system or workflow you shipped, including what it taught you about AI's limitations.

At Urrly, fairness matters. We use AI to review every application against the same clear requirements for the role. Candidates are evaluated only on job-related factors such as skills, certifications, and experience, not personal attributes.

Apply now and receive a response within 24 hours.