Most AI companies are building tools for other engineers. We're building AI
systems for the businesses that actually run the economy — and have no idea
how much they're leaving on the table.
A restaurant group loses $4,000 a month on food waste because nobody's
analyzing their POS data. An apartment operator with 200 units can't connect
their property management software to their accounting. An online retailer
spends 30 hours a week on manual processes an AI agent could handle in
minutes. These are real clients, not hypotheticals.
Calibrate Group is the AI implementation partner for owner-operated businesses
doing $3M–$10M in revenue. We diagnose exactly where they're bleeding money,
build the AI system that fixes it, and stay to optimize it over time.
Restaurants, multifamily real estate, e-commerce, service businesses — any
operator who runs their business on spreadsheets and gut instinct.
We have clients ready to go. We need the person who builds the engine.
THE ROLE
You're the first technical hire and the third member of a founding team with
decades of experience starting, scaling, and operating real businesses across
real estate, hospitality, and DTC. You own every technical decision —
architecture, stack, tooling, integrations, and eventually hiring your own
team. This is a co-builder role with founding-level equity.
Here's what your first month actually looks like: you sit in a room with a
restaurant owner who knows their numbers are off but doesn't know where. You
connect to their POS, their accounting software, their inventory system. You
build the thing that tells them exactly what's wrong and exactly what to do
about it — and it shows up in their inbox Monday morning in plain English. No
dashboards they'll never check. No logins they'll forget. A clear, specific
action they can take before the lunch rush.
If that excites you more than optimizing a deployment pipeline, keep reading.
WHAT YOU'LL BUILD
The AI-powered diagnostic and implementation layer for real businesses:
* Connect to the systems small businesses actually use — Toast, Square, QuickBooks, AppFolio, Mindbody, Salesforce — and extract insights the owner has never seen
* Build AI agent workflows using Claude API and custom tooling that deliver specific, actionable outputs directly to operators (email, SMS, voice — not dashboards)
* Design modular "building blocks" so what you build for client #1 accelerates client #2 and client #3
* Create the technical foundation for a consulting-to-platform business that scales beyond any individual engagement
* Sit in rooms with business owners, explain what we're building in language they understand, and iterate based on what they actually use
WHO YOU ARE
You've shipped real products to real users — not internal tools for engineers,
but things that non-technical people interact with every day. You've built
from zero at least once in your career, whether as a founding engineer, a
technical co-founder, or the first engineer at a startup that actually
launched.
You build with AI daily. Not Copilot autocomplete — you're calling Claude or
OpenAI APIs, designing agent workflows, building RAG pipelines, orchestrating
tools. You understand when to use an LLM and when a rules-based approach is
better. You've thought about token costs, model selection, and what happens
when the AI is wrong.
Most importantly, you think about the person using what you build. When
someone describes a business problem, your first instinct is "what does the
owner see Monday morning?" — not "what infrastructure do I need?" You'd rather
ship a working email report in a week than architect a perfect system in a
quarter.
What we're looking for specifically:
* 8+ years shipping production software with real product or SaaS experience
* Production AI: Claude API, OpenAI, agent architectures, RAG, tool orchestration, structured output — you've built and deployed these, not just experimented
* Full-stack capable — backend, frontend, and integration layer
* Can explain what you build to someone who doesn't know what an API is
* Comfortable with no spec, no PM, no existing codebase — you decide what to build
* Strong signals: founding engineer experience, work in restaurants/real estate/SMB, consulting or agency background, cover letter that shows you understand what we're doing
WHO THIS IS NOT FOR
We've reviewed 50+ candidates for this role. Here's what we've learned about
fit:
This isn't an infrastructure role. If your gravity is at the deployment,
DevOps, or ML pipeline layer — building the systems that serve models rather
than the products that use them — we respect the craft, but it's not this job.
We need someone who thinks about what the AI does for the human, not how it
runs.
This isn't a "manage a team of engineers" role on day one. If your first
instinct is to hire developers under you before shipping anything yourself,
this isn't the right fit. You need to be the one writing code, calling APIs,
and pushing to production for the first 6–12 months.
This isn't for AI-adjacent engineers. Using Cursor and Copilot to write code
faster is great, but it's not the same as building AI-powered products for end
users. If your resume says "AI" but your work is traditional web development
with AI-assisted coding, we'll notice.
If you're applying to 50 roles this week and sending the same cover letter to
all of them — we'll notice that too. This is a founding role. Show us you've
read this and tell us specifically why this problem interests you.
COMP & STRUCTURE
$160K–$200K base + 4.0%–4.5% founding equity + fully remote (US-based, no
sponsorship)
The equity is real. This is not a token grant at a Series B company. You're
joining at zero and building the thing that creates the value.
TO APPLY
Don't just submit a resume. Write us a few sentences about why this specific
role at this specific company interests you. Bonus points if you tell us what
you'd build first.
Contact: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])