Founding AI Engineer

Full Description

AI Engineer - Full Stack (Quebec, Canada)The Role

We're hiring our first dedicated AI engineer to own the intelligence layer of a fast-growing commercial real estate platform.

You'll architect AI systems from scratch, make key technical decisions, and directly shape how tens of thousands of commercial real estate (CRE) professionals work.

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role where you'll:Build Novel Document Intelligence

• Design production systems that extract structured data from messy, complex real estate documents

• Solve hard problems: multi-sheet Excel parsing, context-aware classification, intelligent data normalization

• Own the full pipeline from raw PDFs → structured data → API delivery

• Build systems that will process millions of documents and potentially serve external customers via API

Architect AI Agent Systems

• Design multi-agent frameworks that reason about complex financial and market scenarios

• Fine-tune LLMs for specialized real estate tasks (rent roll analysis, financial modeling, market evaluation)

• Build RAG systems for semantic search across massive document collections

• Create robust, production-grade prompt engineering frameworks

Drive Product Innovation

• Develop conversational AI interfaces that are very useful, not gimmicky

• Build intelligent analysis tools (automated SWOT, market comps, deal screening)

• Design cost-effective AI usage patterns at scale

• Make architectural decisions about models, infrastructure, and data pipelines

Your Day-to-Day Reality:

• Work alongside a solid 5-person engineering team, but own your projects end-to-end

• Ship weekly, iterate fast, balance innovation with reliability

• Bridge between cutting-edge AI capabilities and practical business problems

This isn't a role where you'll implement someone else's specs. You'll have real ownership, technical autonomy, and direct impact on company direction.

About Cactus

We're a well-funded US company with Canadian founders, transforming how commercial real estate professionals work.

Our customers - brokers, acquisition teams, analysts - currently waste hours on manual document processing and deal analysis.

We're building AI-powered automation that eliminates this tedious work.

We have a successful V1 product and are launching Cactus 2.0: a reimagined platform with intelligent, conversational workflows.

We're bringing modern AI to a massive, conservative industry that desperately needs it but doesn't know how to build it themselves.

The market opportunity: Commercial real estate is a $20+ trillion industry still running on Excel spreadsheets and manual processes.

Document extraction alone is a problem nearly every CRE company faces daily.

We're already seeing demand for our extraction capabilities beyond our core product.

What You'll Learn

Deep Domain Expertise in a Major Industry

• Master commercial real estate finance, valuation, and underwriting - valuable knowledge whether you stay in tech or explore other opportunities

• Understand how major institutional deals work (acquisitions, developments, financing)

• Build expertise in a $20T+ market that most engineers never get exposure to

Practical AI at Scale

• Work on production AI systems with real users and meaningful stakes

• Learn what actually works in production vs. what's hyped in research papers

• Build intuition for when to use fine-tuning vs. RAG vs. prompt engineering vs. custom models

Business Building

• Direct access to founders - learn strategy, sales, product, and fundraising alongside technical work

• See how early-stage companies make high-stakes decisions with limited resources

• Understand how to evaluate market opportunities and build products customers will pay for

Unique Benefit: As you develop CRE expertise, you'll have opportunities to participate in real estate investments alongside the company as we grow.

We believe in helping our early team build wealth beyond just equity.

What We're Looking For:Must-Haves:

Deep AI/ML Expertise

• Built production AI systems that handle real user traffic and edge cases

• Strong experience with LLM fine-tuning, RAG architectures, prompt engineering

• Understanding of embedding models, vector databases, semantic search

• Ability to evaluate trade-offs: when to use GPT-4 vs. fine-tuned models vs. traditional ML

Solid Engineering Foundation

• Strong Python skills (FastAPI, LangChain, or similar)

• Can build functional frontends when needed (Next.js/React—framework flexibility fine)

• Comfortable with APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure (Supabase, Vercel, AWS)

• Experience shipping maintainable production code

Ownership Mentality

• Take projects from concept → production independently

• Make pragmatic decisions between perfect and shipped

• Communicate progress and blockers clearly

• Thrive in ambiguity and early-stage environments

Product Thinking

• Understand AI as a tool for better UX, not an end in itself

• Explain complex systems simply to non-technical stakeholders

• Balance innovation, reliability, and cost

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience in finance, real estate, or document-heavy industries

• Background in NLP, computer vision, or information extraction

• Open source AI/ML contributions

• Workflow automation experience (n8n, Make, Zapier)

• Previous startup or 0→1 experience

What We Don't Care About:

• Perfect full-stack skills (competence > mastery - we have frontend specialists)

• Prestigious credentials (show us what you've built)

• Years of experience (exceptional + motivated > experienced + coasting)

What We Offer:

• Competitive compensation with meaningful equity as an early technical hire

• True technical autonomy—make architectural decisions, choose tools, set direction

• Real impact—your work directly determines product success and company trajectory

• Strong team—smart, low-ego engineers who value shipping and collaboration

• Health benefits and flexible remote work

• Learning opportunities—gain CRE expertise and potential real estate investment access

Our Pace: Early-stage startup intensity.

We move fast, iterate constantly, and ship weekly.

If you're excited about high autonomy and rapid execution in an evolving environment, you'll love it here.

If you prefer structure and predictability, we're probably not the right fit.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $50,000.00-$200,000.00 per year

Work Location: Remote