# Founding Software Engineer - AI & Operations (Full-Stack)

**Company:** [United Concrete](http://jobs.workable.com/companies/dxdQh1uAM6DwwPC33j3GL1.md)
**Location:** Wallingford, United States
**Workplace:** on site
**Employment type:** Full-time
**Department:** Plant 1

[Apply for this job](http://jobs.workable.com/view/3977da7b-837d-472f-80a7-ea1a424a7afb)

## Description

### The short version

We make precast concrete — the stuff underneath roads, buildings, and utilities across the Northeast. Our plants run on spreadsheets, memory, and paper. We're hiring **one engineer** to change that, with full ownership of architecture, stack, and roadmap.

You won't inherit legacy code. You won't ship features into a backlog nobody reads. You'll build systems that people 50 feet from your desk use every day — and they'll tell you, immediately and honestly, whether they work.

### Why this role is different

-   **You choose the stack.** Green-field. Data model to UI, it's yours.
-   **AI is the job, not a bolt-on.** Real problems waiting for it:

-   We recently caught a **$6,000 forklift parts invoice** that a 5-minute manual price check found for half the cost. We want an OCR + LLM pipeline that catches every one of those automatically.
-   We have **10+ years of sales history** and no forecasting. Every busy season, high-demand products stock out. You'll build the model that flags shortfalls before they happen.
-   A heater once ran all winter and nobody noticed until the bill review — **years later.** You'll build anomaly detection on energy and utility data so that never happens again.

-   **Direct P&L impact.** Your code will save real money, measurably, within months — not "improve engagement metrics."
-   **You'll work across the whole business:** production scheduling, dispatch and truck routing (including oversized loads), job cost accounting, predictive maintenance, procurement, and compliance.

### What you'll build (first 12–18 months)

-   **AI invoice auditing** — OCR + LLM pipeline that extracts line items from scanned vendor invoices and checks them against market pricing, with human review where errors are costly
-   **Demand forecasting** — ML/time-series models on a decade of sales data, cross-referenced with mold inventory, to recommend what to pour next
-   **Unified inventory & job costing** — one system for raw materials, finished goods, labor hours, and purchases tied to specific jobs
-   **Route & load planning** — truck routing by weight capacity, trailer selection for over-weight/over-width loads, freight costs flowing into job cost sheets
-   **Predictive maintenance** — evaluate our existing MaintainX deployment (keep it, replace it, or integrate it — your call), then use maintenance history to flag high-wear parts before they fail
-   **Compliance & alerts** — fleet registrations, insurance, inspections, and real-time shipping/receiving notifications

### Logistics

-   **Location:** 173 Church Street, Yalesville, CT — onsite with the people you're building for _(adjust if hybrid flexibility is approved)_
-   **Compensation:** \[$X–$Y base\] + \[benefits summary\] _(strongly recommend posting a range — it materially improves reply and apply rates)_
-   **Process:** intro call → technical deep-dive on a system you built → short practical exercise (invoice-extraction design) → meet the plant team → offer. **Two weeks, start to finish, if you move fast.**

## Requirements

-   **3+ years** of professional engineering experience, including at least one production system you owned **end-to-end** (data model → API → UI)
-   Strong full-stack fundamentals: a modern backend language, solid **SQL/relational design**, and a modern frontend framework — we care more about judgment than any specific stack
-   You've shipped **LLM API integrations into production** (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) — structured, task-specific automation, not chatbot demos
-   You've worked with **OCR / document extraction** and turned messy scans into clean, queryable data
-   You know when a simple regression beats a fancy model — and when AI **doesn't earn its complexity**
-   You use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Copilot) daily and ship faster because of it
-   You genuinely enjoy sitting down with a dispatcher or plant manager, understanding their manual process, and turning it into software they actually adopt
-   You're self-directed and comfortable being the first engineer

**Bonus points:** manufacturing/logistics/construction software, route optimization or constraint problems, anomaly detection on time-series data, AI-assisted procurement tools.

### You're probably _not_ a fit if

-   You want a large engineering org, a defined career ladder, and someone else deciding the architecture
-   You need a product manager between you and your users
-   You're only interested in fully remote work

## Benefits

-   Paid Vacation
-   Paid Holidays and Sick Time
-   Company 401K 10% Match
-   Group Medical and Dental