Founder AI ML Engineer

This is a founding AI / ML engineer role at Ultra-Ops.

Ultra-Ops operates today as an existing construction operations company, providing human-delivered services to real construction businesses. The company is now rapidly transitioning those proven human workflows into AI-augmented and AI-automated systems.

This role is not research-only and not experimental. You will be building production AI systems inside a live business with existing customers, active revenue, and ongoing discussions with angel investors and VCs. Speed of execution matters.

As a founding engineer, you will work directly with the founder to:

• Define the AI roadmap and technical architecture
  

• Decide what to build vs. buy
  

• Translate operational pain points into deployable AI systems
  

• Move quickly from prototype to production
  

You will have meaningful influence over:

• Model and tooling selection
  

• Data strategy and pipelines
  

• System architecture and integrations
  

• Future AI hiring and team direction
  

This is a builder role for someone who wants ownership, autonomy, and a direct hand in shaping both the product and the company. There are two technical people in the company - this is a phenomenal time to be the third. 

Requirements

The primary responsibility is to design and implement AI modules for construction operations, starting with the following focus areas.

Blueprint Ingestion & Understanding:

• Build systems to ingest construction blueprints and plan sets (PDFs)
  

• Apply OCR and document parsing to extract structured data
  

• Support layout understanding, annotations, and metadata extraction
  

• Produce outputs usable by downstream systems (CRM, proposals, takeoffs)
  

Employee Productivity & Internal AI Tools:

• Develop AI tools that assist individual employees with email drafting, summarization, and response generation
  

• Ground outputs in CRM data, operational history, and internal knowledge
  

• Integrate AI assistance directly into daily workflows
  

Product Manuals & Technical Intelligence:

• Build AI systems that ingest product manuals, spec sheets, and technical documentation
  

• Enable accurate question-answering and knowledge retrieval
  

• Support outputs for internal tools, websites, webpages, and customer-facing chatbots
  

• Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or equivalent architectures
  

Core Technical Skills:

• Strong Python experience
  

• Hands-on experience with modern ML / AI frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, transformers)
  

• Experience with OCR, NLP, or document-processing pipelines
  

• Familiarity with LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and RAG systems
  

• Ability to design APIs and integrate AI into production systems
  

Engineering Mindset:

• Comfortable working with real-world, imperfect data
  

• Ability to move from prototype to production quickly
  

• Experience integrating AI into existing software stacks
  

• Understanding of iteration, monitoring, and improvement in live systems
  

Nice to Have:

• Experience with construction, AEC, or blueprint data
  

• Front-end or product integration experience
  

• Exposure to MLOps or model deployment
  

• Interest in mentoring junior engineers as the team grows
  

Founder Expectations:

• Comfort operating with ambiguity
  

• Bias toward execution and delivery
  

• Willingness to prioritize speed over polish
  

• Desire to build a company, not just a codebase
  

This is a founding technical role for someone who wants to build real AI systems that replace and enhance human workflows in construction operations, inside a company with customers, revenue, and investor momentum already underway.