AI Systems Engineer (PhD-Level) at Prophetic Software

Prophetic is revolutionizing the real estate development industry by building an AI-native platform that processes billions of data points across all 50 states. This role involves working directly with the Chief AI Officer to develop the core AI systems powering Prophetic’s platform.

About the Role

You will build and improve the AI systems that power SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap. This is not a pure research role—you will ship production code that runs nationally.

Your responsibilities span agentic systems, harness engineering, data engineering, and machine learning applications. You will transform messy public records (zoning ordinances, council minutes, assessor files, permits, parcel geometry, etc.) into actionable insights for land teams.

This is a high-bar, PhD-level role requiring expertise at the intersection of research and production engineering, turning cutting-edge AI into shipped product features.

What You'll Do

• Build and enhance AI systems for SearchAI, ZoneAI, SiteAI, CouncilAI, and DevMap:

  • SearchAI identifies parcels in a market that can support desired developments.

  • ZoneAI reads and structures municipal zoning ordinances nationwide into parcel-level buildability rules.

  • SiteAI generates road and lot layouts on real parcels and reports the number of homes they can yield.

  • CouncilAI harvests city council and planning commission agendas/minutes to surface development activity in real time.

  • DevMap detects and attributes residential development nationwide, including lot, builder, and

• Design agentic systems that discover, crawl, and extract data from thousands of municipal and county sources, making them efficient and reliable for nationwide use.

• Collaborate with the evals team to build ground-truth and benchmark sets, driving real accuracy gains in extraction and inference.

• Scale inference and data processing, focusing on throughput, cost, and failure handling across national runs involving hundreds of millions of records.

• Work with geospatial data at scale, including parcel geometry, zoning, topography, and market data, across all 50 states.

• Ship production-quality code in pipelines and services, integrating research outputs into the platform.

• Collaborate with engineering on architecture decisions and with product on feature prioritization.

• Evaluate and integrate new AI capabilities as the field evolves.

What You Need

• A PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent industry experience.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems.

• Strong systems engineering skills in data pipelines, orchestration, and agentic systems running in production.

• Experience scaling large systems around model inference and data processing, including throughput limits, cost control, batch orchestration, and handling hundreds of millions of rows.

• Deep, hands-on experience with LLMs in production, including prompt and context engineering and evaluation.

• Strong Python skills and comfort owning your own deployments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with geospatial data (PostGIS, spatial analysis, satellite imagery).

• Experience with optimization or computational geometry.

• 2+ years at an early-stage startup.

• Background in proptech or real estate data.