Founding Full Stack Engineer - AI Focused

Proper Hospitality is seeking a Founding Full-Stack Engineer (AI-focused) to build the production systems behind our hospitality OS—spanning agent workflows, data pipelines, and backend infrastructure. What We're Building Hospitality is one of the oldest, most human industries in the world. It has also barely changed operationally in decades. We're changing that — not with a point tool, not with a clever chatbot, but with a platform that reimagines how an entire property thinks, operates, and serves its guests. This is a product, not an internal tool. It has to work on day one at a single property and scale cleanly to hundreds. Every architectural decision compounds over time. Every agent will be onboarded to new properties, new teams, and new data environments. We are replacing workflows that have been done by hand for decades. Done right, this changes what it means to run a hotel. The Kind of Engineer We Need You default to "how do we make this work" and you stay in the problem until it ships. You think in systems: boundaries, failure modes, operability, and long-term maintainability. You are comfortable moving deliberately on foundations so we can move fast on product later. You've hit walls before — legacy systems, incomplete data, skeptical stakeholders — and found a path through. You understand agents are powerful and brittle, and you design for reality. You build AI honestly. You care more about what works in production than what demos well. What This Role Is Full stack, backend-leaning. You can ship end-to-end, but you will spend most of your time on the backend: APIs, data systems, orchestration, and infrastructure. Platform builder, not feature factory. You design systems a new property can onboard to without a rebuild. You build primitives that make downstream product work faster and safer. Agents — real ones. You design workflows that are observable, testable, and resilient. You build the guardrails: retries, fallbacks, rate limits, and human-in-the-loop. Scaling infrastructure and architecture. You make early architectural choices with clear tradeoffs. You build for multi-property, multi-tenant realities: config, permissions, environments, and evolving schemas. Data fluent. You build pipelines from messy real-world sources: PMS records, reservation systems, and long-living documents. You design for what breaks when data quality slips. Quality-driven. You define what "good" looks like before you build. You build evals and regression checks that prevent silent failure. What You'll Do Build backend systems that power agent workflows in production. Orchestrate jobs, manage state, design idempotency, and handle retries. Design and scale the data layer. Pipelines, schemas, quality checks, and freshness from legacy property systems through to live inference. Take on technically challenging architecture. Multi-tenant design, integration abstractions, permissions models, and robust failure handling. Own quality end to end. Define evals, catch regressions, and raise the bar under deadline pressure. Ship v0s fast without creating future traps. Know which decisions are reversible and which foundations must be correct. What We're Looking For 3–6 years of engineering experience building and operating production systems. Strong backend fundamentals. APIs, data modeling, distributed systems basics, and pragmatic infrastructure. Experience building data pipelines in messy real-world environments. Experience integrating with legacy systems and uncooperative third parties. Practical understanding of AI systems. How models fail, how tool-use breaks, and how to design around brittleness. Strong engineering judgment. You can explain tradeoffs, keep scope tight, and choose simple approaches that scale. Nice To Haves Experience operating systems with multi-tenant requirements. Experience with evaluation frameworks for AI/agent workflows. Experience building internal platforms or shared primitives that multiple teams build on. Hospitality, travel, or other "messy ops" domain experience. Who This Is Not For Someone who sees legacy systems as blockers rather than puzzles. Someone who optimizes for demos over durable systems. Someone who overpromises what AI can do to get buy-in, then under-delivers. Details Experience: 3–7+ years software engineering Compensation: $160K–$190K DOE Access: Direct access to the CEO, President, COO, and Head of Systems Impact: Your work goes live across 12 properties, affecting real guests and real revenue. This isn't a sandbox. In Your Application, Include A production AI/LLM system you built that other people depend on. What does it do? What breaks? How do you know it's working? A technical challenge you solved where the hard part wasn't the code — it was the data quality, the edge cases, or the integration with messy real-world systems. Your take: if you had access to 8 hotel data systems and a Claude API key, what's the first agent you'd build and why? Compensation & Recognition Competitive Salary + Bonus: Rewarding exceptional talent and performance across all levels. Recognition Programs: Celebrating achievements big and small through company-wide appreciation and milestone rewards. Annual Performance Reviews: Regular opportunities for feedback, growth, and advancement. Benefits Comprehensive Health Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision plans through Aetna, designed to fit a range of personal and family needs. Wellness Access: Company-subsidized memberships with Equinox and ClassPass, plus wellbeing workshops and mental health resources. Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Confidential support for emotional wellbeing, financial planning, and life management through Unum. Paid Time Off: Flexible PTO plus 11 paid holidays each year for corporate team members. Paid Parental Leave: Paid time off for eligible employees welcoming a new child through birth, adoption, or foster placement. Flexible Work Practices: Hybrid schedules for eligible roles and an emphasis on work-life balance. 401(k) Program: Company match of 50% of employee deferrals, up to the first 4% of eligible compensation. Employer-Paid Life & Disability Insurance: Core protections with optional additional coverage. Financial Education: Access to planning tools and workshops to support long-term stability and growth. Hotel Stay Benefits: 75% off BAR (floor of $100) across the Proper portfolio. Design Hotels Partnership: 50% off participating Marriott Design Hotels. Dining Discounts: 75% off food & beverage at all Proper Hospitality outlets. Lifestyle Perks: Complimentary or subsidized parking, cell phone reimbursement, and exclusive hospitality and retail discounts. Equal Opportunity Statement Proper Hospitality is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status. J-18808-Ljbffr