Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Demand IQ is a lean SaaS company focused on building AI solutions for residential contractors. They are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to take their AI agent-guided home-services buying experience product from alpha to full release, owning the full lifecycle of the product and ensuring it effectively sells home services through autonomous interactions.
Responsibilities
- 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
Skills
- 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
- 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
Benefits
- 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.
Company Overview