Founding Software Engineer
Own the technical architecture of our regulatory-intelligence platform, working directly with the founders.
About Flotive
A solar farm sits dead for eight months because someone missed a county setback ordinance buried on page 340 of a zoning code. A transmission line gets rerouted, at a cost of millions, because an environmental filing cited the wrong watershed. A data center waits months for power because a utility and developer are working from different versions of the interconnection rules.
This isn't an engineering problem or a capital problem. It's an information problem. The rules that decide whether America gets built are scattered across thousands of agencies and millions of pages of regulatory text. Searching, cross-referencing, and verification has been a manual process, becoming the primary determinants of how long it takes for a project to get built.
Flotive fixes that. We build AI systems that continuously ingest regulations, technical standards, permitting requirements, and agency guidance; understand how they relate to specific projects and locations; and produce verifiable, explainable answers backed by primary sources. Our customers spend less time searching for requirements and more time designing, permitting, and building. We're starting with power projects, but our work has the potential to have far reaching impacts on all types of developments—from housing to mining.
Our mission is simple:
Help society build and run infrastructure while maintaining the highest standards of safety, environmental stewardship, and regulatory compliance.
We believe better information and workflows, not weaker regulation, is the fastest path to building the infrastructure society needs. By reducing the time and cost of regulatory compliance, we can accelerate projects while improving transparency, consistency, and trust in the process.
About the role
As a Founding Backend Software Engineer at Flotive, you will work closely with the co-founders (Francis and Akshay), other engineers, and subject matter experts to understand customer requirements, and own and make decisions on technical architecture before anyone else gets hired to weigh in on them.
The technical core of this job is building a system that ingests regulatory documents at scale, extracts structured knowledge from them, tracks geographic and jurisdictional context, and produces workflows that customers can trust and verify. That means real problems in retrieval, processing, knowledge representation, geospatial reasoning, and customer-facing decision workflows, not CRUD endpoints wrapped around a database.
This is a high-ownership role on a small but elite team, where your decisions will directly shape the customer experience and the company.
What you will work on
- Pipelines that discover, ingest, classify, and monitor regulatory changes across federal, state, and local governments.
- Structured permitting workflows that translate regulatory requirements into clear steps, decision points, dependencies, and permit pathways.
- AI workflows that pull structured, explainable knowledge out of dense regulatory text and make it actionable.
- APIs connecting that regulatory intelligence to our mapping and workflow product.
- Systems for processing large geospatial and regulatory datasets efficiently.
- Architecture decisions that balance moving fast now against not painting ourselves into a corner later.
What we are looking for
- 4+ years of experience as a software engineer with significant ownership over production systems for enterprise or consumer software.
- Experience designing search systems and working with GraphQL and REST APIs.
- Experience building AI agents, agentic workflows, or LLM-powered automation systems using tools such as LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI Assistants/Responses API, or similar frameworks.
- Experience building production APIs and services using modern Python frameworks.
- Experience with PostgreSQL and databases.
- Comfort building and operating on large datasets. GIS experience is helpful but not required.
- Experience deploying and operating production services in cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, GCP, Render, Vercel, or similar platforms.
- Familiarity with containers, CI/CD, observability, and the operational practices needed to keep production systems reliable.
- Embodies a startup mentality, demonstrates ownership, and effectively balances high-quality output with a keen sense of urgency.
Nice to have
- Experience with spatial indexing or mapping frameworks.
- Exposure to infrastructure, energy, environmental permitting, utilities, or regulatory workflows.
- Prior experience at high-growth startups, on founding engineering teams, or in fast-moving 0-to-1 product environments.
Compensation
$150,000 to $180,000 base salary, plus equity.
Our compensation packages include competitive base salary, meaningful equity in the form of stock options, and benefits. Compensation varies based on experience, skill level, and role scope. Relocation assistance is available.
We believe equity is critical to long-term financial upside. As a founding engineer, you will have the option to trade some salary for above-market equity if desired.
Location
This role is in-person, based in Jersey City, NJ. We may relocate to New York City depending on team needs in the future.
Applying
Interested candidates should reach out to careers@flotive.ai with the subject line "Founding Software Engineer" and attach their resume.