Staff Innovation Engineer, Marketplace

About this role

Built's Mission: Connect and simplify doing business in real estate.

Built is the AI-powered platform transforming the way real estate is financed, developed, and managed. Purpose-built for real estate and construction, Built began by fixing construction draw management for lenders and has grown into a comprehensive operating system addressing some of the industry’s most complex challenges. Today, Built is a partner to more than 350 lenders, over 80,000 borrowers and owners, and thousands of contractors, powering 86,000 active projects valued at more than $300 billion. Learn more at getbuilt.com . __________________________

Built is the AI-first platform for construction and real estate finance, managing over $300 billion in annual capital for more than 340 lenders — including 45 of the top 100 U.S. banks. The software Built engineers build governs how capital moves through construction projects: the AI Draw Agent that automates construction loan draw management for institutions like Fifth Third and Ameris, the lender portfolio risk tools that give banks real-time visibility into construction exposure, the compliance and document workflows that protect both borrowers and financial institutions, and the APIs that connect Built to core banking systems across the country. In a domain where precision, reliability, and performance have direct financial consequences, the engineering bar at Built is correspondingly high.

This role sits on Marketplace, expanding Built beyond workflow software into the services that surround every construction project, like inspections, appraisals, insurance, and materials sourcing. The team moves fast: standing up new products with real customers, building the durable platform underneath them, and sharpening the ones already in market.

As a Staff Innovation Engineer , you'll flex across all three of those - architecting core systems, taking new product ideas from concept to pilot, and improving products already in the hands of customers. This is a hands-on building role, not a people-management one, though at the staff level you're expected to drive system design on major initiatives and mentor other engineers on the team.

Our Guiding Principles

• Be Bold. We pursue the biggest problems in our industry, challenge assumptions others take for granted, and take calculated risks to get there. We don't hide behind consensus or committees. Playing it safe is just failing slowly.

• Help Customers Win. We learn our customers' businesses deeply — how they think, how they deploy capital, what keeps them up at night. We treat their capital like our own. We ship leverage, not features. And we measure ourselves by customer results, not our intentions.

• Move with Urgency & Purpose. We bias toward delivery over perfection, remove friction from our own paths, and communicate in real time. Momentum compounds — and we build it every day.

• Own the Outcome. We own outcomes, not just tasks. We hold a high Say:Do ratio and take responsibility from idea through impact. When something breaks, we fix it — we don't wait to be asked.

• Never Satisfied. We raise the bar continuously. We stay curious, hold exacting standards, debate hard, and hold our opinions loosely when the evidence shifts. Excellence is a habit, not an event.

The Team

Marketplace is a tight-knit, tenured team that recently became its own business unit at Built. It's a collaborative group with a strong culture of mentorship and code review.

What You'll Do

• Platform & primitives: Design and build the durable, reusable services that every Marketplace product depends on — things like purchase orders, contract terms, invoicing rails, and workflow/status state machines — using fine-grained microservices and asynchronous workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal). This work is judged on quality attributes: maintainability, scalability, reliability, and flexibility.

• New product bets: Partner directly with customers to scope a problem, ship a working (not perfect) version of a new marketplace product within about 30 days, and iterate weekly based on direct customer feedback. Form and test hypotheses with discipline — know when to keep pushing, when to pivot, and when to walk away.

• Adoption & optimization: For products that have already launched, focus on quality, craftsmanship, and driving adoption and usage — optimizing workflows and click paths and making the product the best version of itself for customers already using it.

• AI-native development: Build and refine agent harnesses and layered prompting systems (system, policy, and steering prompts) that automate real workflows — for example, extracting and reasoning over unstructured documents (loan covenants, plans and specs, appraisals) using a mix of AWS Textract, GCP Document AI, and direct calls to models like Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI, choosing the right tool for the document and cost profile. Build and use internal eval tooling to test and improve these systems before and after they ship.

• Partner with product, design, sales, and the General Manager to understand customer problems and give input on pricing, GTM, and scale/pivot/kill calls for the bets you're closest to — final commercial decisions rest with the GM and PM, not the engineer.

• Mentor other engineers on the team through code review and pairing, and contribute to system design and architecture decisions even on bets you aren't personally driving.

• Maintain the team's service and product-API boundaries (services don't call services; product APIs stay one-to-one with the user journeys they serve) as the team scales its footprint.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with strong backend/distributed-systems fundamentals — designing services and APIs that need to be reliable and maintainable, not just prototypes.

• Hands-on experience building and shipping 0-to-1 products or features in a fast-iteration environment with real customers, ideally using d

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