Senior Innovation Engineer, Marketplace

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 Senior Innovation Engineer, you'll contribute across those same three areas — helping build platform primitives, shipping new product prototypes with real customers, and improving products already in market — typically owning a well-scoped piece of that work with support from staff engineers and your manager, rather than driving an entire initiative end-to-end on your own. This is a hands-on building role, not a people-management one; you'll also start mentoring newer engineers on the team as you grow into more ownership.

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, experienced 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: Help 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).
• New product bets: Build prototypes and MVPs for new marketplace products, working directly with customers to validate ideas quickly and iterating weekly based on their feedback.
• Adoption & optimization: Support quality, craftsmanship, and adoption work on products that have already launched — improving workflows, fixing friction points, and raising the bar on usability for customers already using them.
• AI-native development: Build and refine agent harnesses and AI/LLM-integrated workflows — for example, extracting and reasoning over unstructured documents using a mix of document-extraction tooling and direct calls to models like Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI. Use the team's internal eval tooling to test and improve what you ship.
• Participate in customer discovery conversations and synthesize findings into clear input for the team's product and engineering leads.
• Partner with staff engineers on system design decisions, and begin taking on informal mentorship of newer engineers on the team.
• Help identify and fix friction in the team's workflows within the scope of your own projects.

What You'll Bring

• Typically 4-7 years of experience in software engineering, with solid backend/distributed-systems fundamentals.
• Experience shipping a technical MVP or prototype from concept to a customer-testable state, ideally in a fast-iteration environment with real customers.
• Some experience building with or integrating LLM providers (e.g., Claude, Gemini, OpenAI) and/or document-extraction tooling, or strong aptitude and interest in growing into it quickly.
• Exposure to agent harnesses, RAG pipelines, or other AI/LLM-integrated workflows is a plus.
• Data engineering, ML, or document-processing background is a meaningful plus — a good amount of this team's work involves reasoning over unstructured, non-standardized documents (legal terms, covenants, inspection reports).
• Comfort working across the stack as needed, plus genuine curiosity about the customer problem, low ego, and a preference for working closely with product rather than in a handoff model.
• Experience in financial services, construction, real estate, payments, lending, insurance, or other complex B2B environments is a meaningful differentiator, though not required.

What Success Looks Like at Six Months

• You've shipped a meaningful piece of work in at least one of the team's three workstreams — a platform primitive, a new product prototype tested with real customers, or a usage/adoption improvement on a live product.
• You've contributed to or improved an agent-driven or AI-integrated system that's in production use.
• Other engineers on the team would describe you as a reliable, collaborative contributor who's growing into more ownership and mentoring newer teammates.
• Your customer discovery input is seen as a trusted contribution to the team's product decisions.

AI & Technology Expectations

• Leverage AI tools to enhance the productivity, quality, and speed of your work.
• Use AI to support drafting, analysis, summarization, and problem-solving across your role.
• Identify opportunities to streamline workflows and reduce manual effort through automation and AI.
• Apply AI to sharpen decision-making and strengthen technical and product insights.
• Share effective AI use cases and best practices with your team.

Built’s salary range for this position is $140,000-$180,000 USD per year. The pay range is designed to accommodate upward mobility in the role; therefore, it encompasses the full span of proficiency levels for this role and we believe that the midpoint of the range is competitive in the market. Salary is just one component of Built's total compensation package for employees; your total rewards package at Built will include equity, market-current medical, dental and vision coverage, an unlimited PTO policy, and other benefits.