About the role
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!
About Alkali
The smarter way to estimate steel.
Required skills
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Job details
Salary
$150,000 - $220,000
Equity
0.75% - 1.5%
Location
New York, NY
Experience
0+ years
Funding
Total raised
$500K
Last stage
Seed
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.