Staff Software Engineer

About PulleyPulley helps the country’s top architects, builders, and retailers speed up every project in their portfolio. With AI-powered permitting intelligence and expert guidance, we eliminate costly delays and bring predictability across the full lifecycle of commercial projects.Today, permitting is the slowest, most uncertain part of building, spread across 19,000+ jurisdictions with different rules, timelines, and surprises. Pulley gives project teams the clarity and predictability they need to move from planning to opening without delays.We support rollout programs for brands like J.Crew, Solidcore, and Hibbett Sports, as well as major data center buildouts, EV charging networks, and other commercial projects. Our platform dramatically reduces approval timelines, improves forecasting accuracy, and removes thousands of hours of manual work from design and construction teams.Founded in 2021, Pulley combines deep permitting expertise with purpose-built AI from people who have created products used by millions. We’re backed by CRV, Susa Ventures, Fifth Wall, and leaders from Plaid, Segment, ServiceTitan, and Procore.What You'll DoIn this role, you will build the product that gets stuff built. You'll work closely with engineers, designers, and end-users to accelerate our product development. As a staff-level software engineer at Pulley, you will:Own problem areas, not just features—define the technical direction for a domain spanning multiple product surfaces, and carry it from ambiguity through architecture to shipped, iterated-on productTurn unstructured permitting documents, city regulations, and jurisdiction workflows into fast, reliable product experiences, with AI at the core of how the product worksBuild with AI agents as a daily practice—directing, reviewing, and shipping agent-driven work at high velocity while owning the quality barMake the technical bets that determine what Pulley can build next year, not just this quarter—and own the consequences of those bets in productionMultiply the engineers around you: set technical direction others build within, mentor senior engineers toward larger scope, and make the whole team faster through the systems, standards, and abstractions you createWho You AreYou thrive in ambiguity—you'd rather define the right problem than execute a spec, and you're energized rather than paralyzed when the path isn't laid outYou're product-minded: you care whether the thing you built actually solved the customer's problem, and you'll talk to users to find outYou have strong opinions about quality and velocity and don't treat them as a tradeoff — you look for the tools, abstractions, and processes that buy bothYou default to ownership at organizational scale: when something is broken or missing—a system, a process, a gap between teams—your instinct is to fix it, and you don't need permission or a mandate to startNeed to have8+ years of software engineering experienceTrack record of owning a significant technical domain end-to-end: from "this is somebody's problem" through architecture, delivery, and production ownership, including the unglamorous partsFluency in modern full-stack development—we use TypeScript, React, and Google Cloud; you don't need our exact stack, but you should be productive with something similarReal experience building with AI coding agents and LLM-powered features—not just autocomplete; you've shipped work where agents did substantial implementation under your directionAbility to architect durable systems while making pragmatic tradeoffsExperience mentoring engineers or setting technical direction that other engineers built withinBased in the San Francisco Bay Area and willing to work in person 4 days a weekNice to havesExperience in construction tech, govtech, proptech, or another domain where the hard part is messy real-world documents and processesExperience designing evals or otherwise making LLM-powered features reliable in productionExperience as the most senior engineer in a domain—being the person others escalated to when nobody knew the answerStartup experience at the stage where you helped build the team, not just the product