---
title: 'Software Engineering at Foundation'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-foundation-san-francisco-0rs77kpg6gyw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Software Engineering at Foundation

- **Company:** Foundation
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA / Boulder, CO / Austin, TX
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-02-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/foundation/2fffc9a2-7e3a-461c-8bb1-675540024014

## Job description

## INTRODUCTION

Foundation https://buildwithfoundation.com/ is hiring great engineers to accelerate our core business, modernize homebuilding, and transform the experience of buying, selling, and owning homes.

## ABOUT FOUNDATION

Backed by $6.8M in funding from leading VCs (including Y Combinator), Foundation is an ex-Opendoor team transforming residential real estate.

Foundation’s first product is the native customer experience platform for homebuilders — think “Shopify for Homebuilders.” We work with enterprise-scale homebuilders to deliver a modern digital customer experience, dramatically improving both their customer satisfaction and the productivity of their teams. In two years, we’ve demonstrated clear product-market fit and rapid growth — all with just contract design support.

We’re still in the first of three overlapping phases of growth and company-building:

1. Transformative, AI-driven vertical SaaS for homebuilding — a public-scale opportunity in its own right.
2. The enterprise ecosystem for real estate. Homebuilders are the economic engine that starts this flywheel, unlocking an order-of-magnitude larger opportunity. This ecosystem fosters collaboration between adjacent trillion-dollar industries — lending, title, home insurance, home services, retail, and more.
3. The AI-native home operating system and interface. The economic engine of vertical SaaS and the network effects of the enterprise ecosystem fund and fuel the flywheel that enables us to (profitably) deliver the transformative consumer AI experience for homebuyers and homeowners. Find, buy, and operate your home — all with Foundation.

## THE JOB

You’ll help us build the most trusted, modern customer experience platform in homebuilding — and drag the everyday workflows of a huge, traditional industry into the AI era (with taste, pragmatism, and real-world empathy).

This role sits close to product and customers. You’ll ship across the stack, partner with design and go-to-market, and take ownership of meaningful slices of the platform — from early discovery to production hardening. We’re building for real businesses, real revenue, and real users who don’t have time for fragile tools.

What you’ll do (examples, not a checklist):

- Ship product that matters. Build features that improve how builders operate and how buyers experience the home buying journey — fast feedback, frequent releases, and measurable outcomes.
- Own problems end-to-end. Take ambiguous, high-impact problems from “what should we do?” to “it’s live, monitored, and loved.”
- Build calm, composable systems. Create software that’s easy to understand, extend, and operate — the kind of codebase that makes other engineers better.
- Bring AI into real workflows. Use AI where it genuinely helps users (and avoid it where it doesn’t), turning enterprise “forms and friction” into guided, intelligent experiences.
- Work close to customers. Learn how builders think, observe where their tools break down, and build solutions that feel obvious in hindsight.
- Raise the bar. Improve quality, performance, reliability, and developer experience through thoughtful refactors, better primitives, and good defaults.

## THE REQUIREMENTS

We care about craft, curiosity, and follow-through. We’re looking for builders — the kind of engineers who ship, learn, and iterate, with a strong sense of ownership and a bias toward clarity.

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, shipping production software that real users rely on.
- Product-minded builder. You care about the “why,” not just the “what,” and you optimize for customer outcomes over internal elegance.
- Strong fundamentals + good taste. You write clear, maintainable code, choose sensible abstractions, and know when to keep it simple.
- Self-directed and accountable. You can take a goal and run with it — breaking it down, communicating tradeoffs, and delivering without constant oversight.
- Comfort with ambiguity. You enjoy the early-days energy: vague problems, fast iteration, and learning by building.
- Pragmatic about AI. You’re excited about what’s possible, thoughtful about what’s safe and useful, and eager to apply AI in ways that actually improve workflows.
- Collaborative communicator. You work well with designers, PMs, and non-engineers — you can explain, listen, and align.
- Quality and reliability mindset. You test appropriately, you care about observability, and you leave systems better than you found them.

## NICE-TO-HAVES (NOT REQUIRED)

- Experience in SaaS, workflow products, marketplaces, or enterprise-facing systems
- Experience modernizing legacy systems without breaking customers
- Familiarity with multi-tenant architectures, permissions/security, and data modeling
- A track record of building internal tools that make teams dramatically more effective

## About Foundation

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Foundation provides a white-labeled, native mobile and web customer experience platform for homebuilders to manage the entire buyer journey from sales and closing through to warranty and ownership.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Derek Schairer and Luke Groesbeck

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Real Estate Technology (PropTech), Vertical SaaS for Homebuilding
- **Target customers**: B2B – Enterprise and regional homebuilders (e.g., Legend Homes, Betenbough Homes, Trumark Homes)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Deliver world-class technology to help homebuilders sell more homes, more profitably, to happier customers."

## Products & Services
- **Foundation Buyer Apps**: Native, white-labeled mobile apps and an integrated customer portal for homebuyers to track progress, access documents, submit warranty requests, and message their builder team.
- **Operator & Automation**: A control center for sales, closing, and operations teams to manage every buyer and milestone, streamline communication, coordinate handoffs, and automate routine tasks.
- **WarrantyOS**: An integrated system for managing warranty requests, providing automation and insights into buyer and owner interactions.
- **Integrations**: Connects to key back-office systems used by homebuilders.
- **Insights**: Provides actionable data on buyer engagement.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (Private company)
- **Key Metric**: $6.8M in total funding (Pre-Seed round)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Summer 2023 batch, primary partner Garry Tan), along with 4 other unnamed pre-seed investors. Partners include homebuilders like Legend Homes, Betenbough Homes, and Trumark Homes.
- **Growth Signals**: The company has demonstrated rapid early growth, showing clear product-market fit within two years. Headcount grew 133.3% year-over-year to 11 employees. The company is actively hiring for senior engineering roles to accelerate its core business.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Industry Expertise**: Founders have 15+ years of combined experience in homebuilding (Lennar) and real estate technology (Opendoor). This gives them unique insight into the pain points of the industry.
- **"Shopify for Homebuilders" Model**: By providing a white-labeled, modern digital experience, Foundation allows traditional builders to offer a tech-forward customer journey without building the software themselves. This is a key differentiator in a largely offline industry.
- **Early Enterprise Traction**: The company has already secured partnerships with leading national and regional builders, validating its enterprise-grade platform.
- **Long-Term Vision**: Foundation is not just a SaaS tool; it's building a platform with the potential to become an "AI-native home operating system" and a central ecosystem for adjacent industries like lending, title, and insurance.

## Strategic Focus
- **Phase 1: Core Platform Growth**: Accelerating the adoption of its customer experience platform with enterprise-scale homebuilders.
- **AI Integration**: Pragmatically integrating AI into workflows to transform traditional "forms and friction" into guided, intelligent experiences for both builders and buyers.
- **Building the Team**: Aggressively hiring senior engineers to move from contract design support to a full-fledged product and engineering team.
- **Ecosystem Development**: Laying the groundwork for a larger enterprise ecosystem that connects homebuilders with lending, title, home insurance, and home services.

## Why Work Here
- **High Impact, Early Stage**: As an early employee, you will own meaningful problems end-to-end, from discovery to production, with a direct impact on the product and the company's trajectory.
- **Mission-Driven**: The work directly modernizes a massive, traditional industry, improving the experience for both homebuilders and millions of homebuyers.
- **Engineering Culture**: The company seeks "builders" who are product-minded, pragmatic about AI, and value clean, composable systems. The culture emphasizes quality, reliability, and a bias toward action.
- **Work Policy**: The company has a hybrid workspace with offices in San Francisco and Austin. Some roles, like the Lead Designer, are listed as hybrid. The company is described as having an "in-office" culture with a typical time on-site expectation.
- **Backed by Top Investors**: Being a Y Combinator company with backing from leading VCs provides stability and a strong network.

## Sources
1. [buildwithfoundation.com](https://buildwithfoundation.com/)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/foundation-1)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/foundation-2)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/foundation-tech)
5. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/job/software-engineering/9216046)

## Other roles at Foundation

- [Customer Success Manager/Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-manager-lead-foundation-san-francisco-hp5v46veshf3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-lead-foundation-san-francisco-t93dz7ke14f4) — San Francisco, CA
- [Lead Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-designer-foundation-san-francisco-9pd1sh3brmts) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-silna-health-new-york-n965c7pzsrzk) — New York, NY
- [Software Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-system-new-york-new-york-rngq6b23ttrp) — New York New York, United States
- [Software Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-intrinsic-mountain-view-fdyndcv4ewa2) — Mountain View, CA / Munich, Germany / Singapore