AI Engineer — Arbor
Palo Alto / SF Bay (hybrid). 2–3 years shipping production AI. Top-of-market base, founding-tier equity.
There is an industry that builds every home, every hospital, every highway, every school on this planet — and it runs on phone calls.
A multi-trillion-dollar global supply chain organized by tribal knowledge, tracked in spreadsheets, and priced by intuition. The materials inside every wall, floor, and roof you've ever stepped through were sourced by someone who spent half their day on hold.
That era is ending. We're the company ending it.
Arbor is the intelligence layer for the world's largest unautomated commerce category. We move real inventory, into real job sites, in front of real contractors and developers and governments who have been waiting their entire careers for software that actually understands their world. The window to build this is open right now, and it will not stay open for long. We intend to win it.
What we're hiring you to build
Systems that don't just suggest — they decide and act.
You'll build an intelligence that watches a live physical marketplace and prices it in real time. An intelligence that talks to professional buyers in their language, remembers every job they've ever run, and anticipates what's about to go wrong before they do. An intelligence that takes a problem that's been sitting in someone's head for a week and resolves it in a sentence. An intelligence that operates with the trust of a thirty-year supplier rep, at the speed of a model that doesn't sleep.
This is not a chatbot project. This is not a productivity feature.
This is the brain of a new kind of company, and you would help build it.
Who you are
You've shipped LLM products that real people use and pay for. You build agents, not demos. You think in production: latency, cost, evals, failure modes, observability. You can read a P&L and you actually care what the numbers say. You move quickly because you have taste, not because you're sloppy.
You're two to three years into your career and you're already restless, because most of what's being built right now is small.
You want to point to something a year from now and say: I built the intelligence that runs this.
Technical signal
Strong Python and the ability to ship production services end-to-end. Hands-on with the modern agentic stack — tool calling, multi-step reasoning, memory, evals, routing. Comfortable with the real tradeoffs: latency, reliability, unit economics, security. Pragmatic about frameworks; opinionated about quality.
Bonus if you've worked on voice or real-time agents, multi-modal workflows, marketplace pricing systems, or production ML ops at scale.
What we don't care about
Your degree. The brand name of your last employer. Years on a résumé. The shape of your LinkedIn.
We care about what you've shipped, how you think, and whether you can move fast without breaking trust.
Why this is the call of your career
A real wedge. We move physical inventory. The intelligence work compounds with the business in a way pure software companies cannot replicate.
A compounding data moat. Every quote, every substitution, every order, every buyer conversation makes the system sharper. You'd be early enough that what you build defines its shape.
Founding-team ownership without founding-team burnout. Small team. Large surface. Real customers. No theater. You'll set the architecture, the quality bar, and almost certainly help hire the people who come after you.
We ship. No committees, no slide decks pretending to be progress, no AI cosplay.
If you want a role where you can point to a living system used by real builders and say I built the intelligence that runs this — write to us.
