Principal AI Engineer

Demand IQ · Remote · Contract-to-hire (full-time)

You'll take our new AI agent-guided home-services buying experience product from alpha to full release. It's live today, customers are onboarding right now, and you'll own the AI agents at the center of it.

Demand IQ builds AI for residential contractors: the roofing, HVAC, solar, window, and plumbing companies that keep America's homes running. These owners didn't get into business to write ad copy or chase leads. We give them an AI crew that does that work for them: marketing that runs itself, follow-up that never sleeps, sales conversations that close the job.

We're a lean SaaS company. 8 people, 7-figure revenue, a stable base of contractor customers, and a product that's working. What we're missing is one person: an engineer who can take an AI agent from "answers questions" to "books the appointment and closes the deal," and who owns the full lifecycle with ownership of end-to-end product from idea to production through evals and infracture.

Our autonomous buying experience is live in alpha, with paying customers using it today. Over four months you'll take it to full release: make it production-grade, decide what to keep and what to rebuild, and prove what outcomes it can drive for contractors. You'll work hand-in-hand with the CEO. Some weeks you'll be deep in agent behavior and evals, other weeks shipping the web app or rearchitecting the systems those agents live in.

What you'll do

• Own the agent-human experience end-to-end.
  You'll shape how our AI crew talks, listens, and behaves across text, voice, and email. Tone, pacing, objection handling, knowing when to push and when to hand off to a human. Every conversation is product surface area.
• Build agents that sell, not just respond.
  Voice and text agents that qualify inbound leads in seconds, handle objections, book appointments, and ultimately sell home services through a fully autonomous buying experience.
• Take the alpha to full release.
  The product is live and on the clock. You'll harden what works, rebuild what doesn't, and own the call on the stack. Our alpha runs on ElevenLabs + RAG ; you decide whether that's the foundation we scale on.
• Identify and prioritize areas of improvement.
  You'll sit in on customer onboardings and feedback calls, watch real contractors and homeowners use the product, identify what's broken, and write your own tickets. Nobody hands you a backlog here. You build it.
• Own the eval harness.
  You'll build the evals, conversation reviews, and observability that turn thousands of real homeowner interactions into a feedback loop. Find where the agent stumbles, fix it, prove it with data.
• Design the human side of the loop.
  Contractors need to trust, supervise, and correct their AI crew without reading a manual. You'll build the interfaces where humans review conversations, adjust behavior, and take over when it matters.
• Build the web apps around the agents.
  The AI crew lives inside real product: dashboards, estimate flows, onboarding, settings, reporting. You'll ship these with the same care you put into the conversations.
• Ship production AI features with quality and speed.
  From prompt and context architecture to the UI a contractor sees, you'll take features from idea to deployed.
• Set the bar others build on.
  The patterns, architecture, and instincts you leave behind outlast the contract. Agent behavior, memory, tool use. You set the standard the team inherits.

What you'll bring

Technical

• Significant experience building production-level AI agents. This is the hard requirement.
  You've shipped agents to production, ideally for sales, lead gen, or customer-facing use. You know turn-taking, latency budgets, interruption handling, escalation logic, and what it takes to make an agent that converts, not just converses. Our alpha is on ElevenLabs; you'll own whether we scale on it or rebuild, and you can defend the call.
• 7+ years of senior-level product engineering.
  You've owned features end-to-end in production, not just contributed to them.
• A problem-finder's instinct.
  You spot problems before anyone reports them, gather feedback directly from customers, and write your own tickets. You're comfortable on an onboarding or feedback call, then turning what you heard into shipped fixes.
• AI-native workflow.
  You build with Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex daily. You treat context engineering as a core skill, not a trick. You've shipped production features with LLM APIs, voice and multimodal models, embeddings, and retrieval, and you have opinions on what works and what doesn't.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals.
  React and TypeScript on the front, Python or Go on the back. As comfortable building a clean dashboard or multi-step flow as wiring up an LLM pipeline.

Product & ownership mindset

• UX/UI obsession.
  You sweat interaction details. You've shipped interfaces people call delightful, and you can't leave a clunky flow alone.
• Customer empathy for non-technical users.
  You translate stakeholder goals into crisp specs and delightful products. Bonus if you've built for operators who don't read release notes.
• Founder-level ownership.
  You run toward ambiguity, write clean code fast, and treat failures as data for the next sprint.
• Technical leadership.
  You can explain architectural trade-offs to engineers and business outcomes to a contractor in the same afternoon.

Engagement and compensation

• The mission is to prove that you can deliver and maintain a production-quality system
• $220,000 to $270,000 annually ($18,300 – $22,500/month) during 1099 period
• Up to $1,500/month health insurance reimbursement during the contract.
• 0.5–1.5% equity, with vesting starting from day one.
• Remote-friendly, with occasional time in our Denver office.
• We cover your AI tooling. Whatever makes you faster, we pay for it.
• Ship the mission, and the role converts to W-2 full-time with full benefits, 401(k), and a path to owning AI engineering here going forward.

Why this matters

Everyone in AI is building agents that chat. Almost no one is building agents that
sell
. The difference is enormous, and it's where the real engineering lives. Reading intent, handling the objection, knowing when to push and when to shut up, carrying a homeowner all the way to a closed job without a human ever stepping in. Nobody in home services has made that work yet. We're close, and we have live customers proving it's real.

That's the problem you'd own. Not a demo, not a research project. A product selling real jobs for real contractors, with four months to take it from alpha to the thing every competitor scrambles to copy.

Get it right and you're the engineer who made AI actually sell, the way Carvana reshaped buying a car and Shopify reshaped selling online. First to crack it, and it has your fingerprints all over it.

Built in Denver. For the people who build everything else.

How to apply

Send a brief email with your Github, and resume or LinkedIn, plus written answers or a Loom – bonus points for Loom, since communication skills matter in this role. Use subject line "Details matter, Let's build - {Your Name}".

Keep it under 5 minutes total (or a short paragraph per question):

1. We work hard, expectations are high, and the product management & QA layers are thin. You own your outcomes. Some great engineers hate this. What makes you think you won't?
2. Tell us about a production-level AI service you built. What problem were you solving, what surprised you, and what would you do differently?
3. Describe something you shipped with minimal direction and ambiguous requirements. What tradeoffs did you make, and how did you decide?
4. Tell us about a technical or product decision where you disagreed with the person in charge. What did you do, and how did it resolve?

No cover letters. We read every application.

Send to: austinr@demand-iq.com