Founding AI Engineer (Agents & Automation)

About One Intelligence. Multifamily is one of the largest asset classes in America: trillions of dollars of apartment buildings, run every day by a patchwork of software, spreadsheets and people on site. Every one of those buildings has a body. None has ever had a brain. We're building it. One Intelligence is the brain of the physical real estate asset, built to fully automate multifamily operations, from the leasing office to the boiler room. Today, 160 units run on it. A team of 1.5 people grew the platform 93.5× in 273 days. Now we're scaling.

Most software and SaaS companies in real estate give owners and operators a fragmented experience: they need multiple platforms just to deliver Knowledge Work, like leasing, renewals, accounting and investor relations. And none has yet taken the power of AI in Knowledge Work and solved for Physical Work: maintenance, unit turns, repairs and smart-building systems.

We have one single intelligence system to do it all.

We're real estate owners and operators, so we build on live properties, not in a lab or a back office. Every feature is used by our team before it reaches a client.

The role. You'll be one of the first engineers. Our core operating platform is already live. You'll take it to the next level of automation, own big parts of it end to end, ship weekly, and work directly with our founder, John Gagliardo, and the people who use it every day.

What you'll do

• Make our agents run the building. Take One Force, Maya and Osmo from assisting people to running renewals, move-ins and move-outs, collections and reporting on their own, with people stepping in only on exceptions.
• Close the loop on Physical Work. Sensor alerts become work orders, and the right vendor is matched, dispatched, scheduled and verified, automatically.
• Build automations every owner can shape. Let each client set its own policies, approval limits and playbooks, so the platform adapts to how they run their buildings, not the other way around.
• Scale from one portfolio to many. Repeatable client setup, safe upgrades, durable job execution and a data history the agents can trust.
• Lay the groundwork for physical agents. Design the systems that will let today's virtual agents act in the building itself.
• Decide where AI adds value and where plain, predictable code is better.

What we're looking for

• 4+ years building and shipping production software, full stack in TypeScript, React, Node.js and PostgreSQL
• AI-native, required: you build with AI coding tools every day and have shipped LLM agents to production (prompting, tool use, evaluation, guardrails)
• Speed with judgment: you ship fast and know what must not break (money, leases, resident data)
• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership; you'd rather build than wait for a spec
• Bonus: making systems reliable at scale (background jobs, retries, software that runs for many clients); hardware, IoT or robotics; proptech, fintech or operations software

Stack. TypeScript end to end: React, Vite and Tailwind on the front; Node.js and Express on the back; PostgreSQL with Drizzle. AI runs on OpenAI and Anthropic models through our own agent orchestration, with Retell for voice and SMS, Stripe for payments, and IoT sensors for smart-building data. Deployed on Replit.

Your first six months

1. Durable workflow execution. Jobs survive restarts, never run twice and surface failures clearly.

2. A repeatable multi-client platform. Automated provisioning, configuration, migrations, credential isolation and safe upgrades.

3. A policy-governed agent platform. Extend One Force with typed tools, bounded authority, audit trails and measurable evaluations.

4. Closed-loop maintenance automation. Connect resident requests and sensors to dispatch, scheduling, vendor completion and escalation.

5. Autonomous renewals. Connect pricing, offers, concessions, reminders, signing and exceptions, with clear financial controls.

The core workflows are already built and running: leasing, renewals, move-ins and move-outs, maintenance and turns, payments, investor relations and sensors. Your job is to make them reliable across many clients and increasingly autonomous, not to rebuild them from scratch.

Where this goes. Over the next 2 to 7 years, we're turning our virtual agents into physical agents: agents that don't just coordinate Physical Work, but carry it out in the building. We're building both the brain and the physical capability of the asset, solving Knowledge Work and Physical Work as one. The systems you build now are the foundation for that.

Location. Chicago.

Compensation. $170-220K base, plus 0.5%–2% founding equity that vests over time. Full relocation to Chicago.

What this role isn't. We operate like a speedboat, not a cargo ship. There are no layers of process, no long roadmaps handed down, and no waiting for approvals. You'll make calls, ship fast and change course quickly. If you want a big-company role with a narrow lane, this isn't it.

How to apply. Send us your three most impressive builds (links, GitHub, demos or short videos) plus your resume. If there's a fit, you'll have a short call with John, then a paid build on a real One Intelligence workflow.