Founding Engineer at Tightrope (San Francisco, CA)Founding Engineer

Tightrope is building the AI operating layer for commercial buildings and facilities.

The United States has 5.9 million commercial buildings spanning 96 billion square feet. They depend on a network of property management teams, tenants, vendors, and service providers to keep it running. Much of the work today still happens through legacy PMS systems, documents, spreadsheets, inboxes, and manual follow-up.

Our first product is an insurance verification platform for commercial real estate teams. Tightrope ingests hundreds of leases and insurance documents associated with a portfolio, finds liability exposure, and communicates with tenants and vendors until the right documents are on file.

Our founding team has previously built 0→1 teams and products at companies like Merge, Stytch, and Fieldguide. We plan carefully, keep scope tight, and move quickly, without treating long hours or unnecessary complexity as a substitute for good judgment.

Within our first 100 days, we launched in two different states and are supporting millions in square feet of properties. Our team broke through one of the most notoriously rigid industries by prototyping fast, embracing a beginners mindset, and valuing the people we work with — and that's how we intend to keep working.

We’re hiring our second founding engineer. You’ll help scale Tightrope’s first product across entire commercial property portfolios. You’ll build systems that ingest leases and insurance documents, uncover liability exposure, and power the email and voice agents that work with tenants and vendors to close coverage gaps.

You'll also help us decide what's next. You'll run the experiments that uncover our next best areas of opportunity and lead the product you're most excited to own. Comfort with that kind of experimentation is part of the job.

• How do we turn messy documents and communication data into an accurate, explainable view of building operations across entire real estate portfolios?
• How do we build agents that can represent property management teams through weeks of email and voice communication—following up without losing context and knowing when a person needs to step in?
• How do we build AI for non-technical property management operators who are skeptical of automation and want to adopt it one workflow at a time?
• How do we turn the data model and integrations into one unified understanding of each building, so every new Tightrope product starts with more context than the last?

• Has built substantial customer-facing products across the stack and can reason through the full system—from document and data ingestion to data models, agent behavior, and the operator-facing product.
• Wants to own a product while it is still being shaped: working with property management teams, prototyping possible solutions, and developing conviction what needs to be built through real deployments.
• Uses AI tools aggressively to explore ideas, then knows how to make the resulting product accurate, explainable, and dependable enough to work with sensitive customer data and communications.
• Wants to work closely with a small team and contribute meaningfully to both Tightrope’s technical foundation and what we build next.

We care more about slope, judgment, and evidence of ownership than a particular number of years worked or a perfectly matched résumé.

• This is a full-time role based in San Francisco’s Financial District. We work together in person four days a week.
• Base salary of $180,000–$225,000.
• Substantial early-employee equity.