Lead Founding Engineer

Build the AI-native platform every yard of dirt moves through.

Remote (U.S.), with occasional travel to Boston for team time

About Soil Connect

Our founder was paying to get rid of dirt. A builder seven blocks away was willing to pay him for it. They only found each other because the builder happened to stop by. The same dirt was a disposal cost on one site and a valuable resource on another.

Soil Connect was built on a simple idea: making that connection shouldn't be a matter of luck. The same problem plays out across an estimated 4.4 billion cubic yards of dirt moved on U.S. job sites each year. We're building a marketplace that connects the people who have material, the people who need it and the haulers who move it.

Today, developers and contractors bring us a need for material or a place to take their excess. We match them with suppliers, receiving sites and haulers, and our team runs the job through to delivery. Our digital ticketing product records each truckload on the job site. Leading builders and developers already on our platform include Lennar, D.R. Horton, ARCO and Prologis.

Much of that work still runs on phone calls, texts and manual follow-up. We're building software and agents to find material, collect quotes and coordinate jobs, with our operators handling exceptions and judgment calls. Our vision: every yard of dirt moves through one connected platform, from the first quote to the final payment.

The Role

You'll be one of Soil Connect's first in-house engineers and the technical lead for the platform, reporting to our CEO. This is a hands-on role: you'll write production code, make architectural decisions and work directly with operators and customers to decide what to build.

The new platform is being built now with Stackpoint's engineering and product team. You'll help finish it, lead the move of live customers off the legacy system and take ownership as the studio team hands it over. The agent layer on top of it is greenfield. A second in-house engineer is planned to join in 2027, and you'll help hire them.

Why Join

• Customers who already depend on us. You'll build for real jobs at some of the country's largest builders from your first week. One of our largest customers is also an investor.
• The technical seat, from the start. You'll own the architecture, the agent layer and the engineering practices the company builds on, with room to grow as the team does.
• Partnership with Stackpoint. Our venture studio partner works alongside us through the rebuild and remains an operating partner afterward, providing technical and product guidance and access to a network of real estate and construction operators.

What You'll Work On

Your first priorities

• Learn the business alongside our operators and customers, help finish the new platform and complete the legacy migration without disrupting live jobs.
• Build agent workflows for intake, sourcing, outreach, quote capture and follow-up. Record who was contacted, what they quoted and what happened next.
• Build the tools operators need to review agent work, resolve exceptions and run more jobs. Use evals, confidence thresholds and human review to decide what can safely be automated.

As the platform grows

• Extend the workflow from request to payment: customers compare quotes and track jobs; suppliers and haulers respond and coordinate from their phones; load tickets carry through to invoicing.
• Own the data model, company permissions, security and production reliability. Set practical standards for testing, code review, deployment, monitoring and cost.
• Shape priorities with our CEO and team, balancing what helps us learn now with what needs to last. Help hire and onboard the next engineer.

What Success Looks Like

• Live customers move to the new platform and the legacy system is retired without disrupting their jobs.
• Operators handle more jobs per person, with less manual follow-up and faster quotes for customers.
• Agents handle routine sourcing and quote follow-up, and operators trust their output.
• The team ships reliable improvements regularly, and the next engineer can understand and contribute to the codebase quickly.

What You Bring

• Senior, hands-on engineering experience. 6+ years building software, including time as an early engineer at a startup. You've shipped a product from scratch, supported it through growth and taken responsibility for systems you didn't originally build.
• Technical ownership. You've made architecture decisions for a product paying customers relied on, set standards other engineers followed, and helped hire or mentor engineers. You can own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and production data, not just application code.
• Full-stack development. You've built and shipped applications with Next.js, Node.js and Postgres, or an equivalent stack. You can take a change from the interface through the backend and database to production, including authentication and data access.
• Production AI experience. You've shipped LLM-powered workflows with tool use and structured outputs. You can explain how you evaluated reliability, handled failures and managed model cost.
• AI-native engineering workflow. Coding agents are part of how you build, test and review software. You can explain where they improve your work and how you verify what they produce.
• Product judgment and customer proximity. You work directly with users to understand the problem before choosing a solution. You're comfortable building for both office teams and people working from a phone on a job site.
• Clear communication and shared ownership. You share progress and risks early, explain tradeoffs without jargon and bring possible solutions when something goes wrong. You want to build with a small team, not work in isolation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Marketplace, logistics, dispatch or field operations software
• Voice agents, phone systems or text messaging in production
• Construction industry experience

How We Work

We take responsibility for outcomes, raise problems early and help each other solve them. We stay close to customers and choose useful, straightforward solutions over unnecessary complexity.

Our core values are family, passion, communication, transparency and customer focus.

Compensation

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity
• Comprehensive health benefits

If you read this and want to own the platform every yard of dirt moves through, we'd like to talk.