AI Engineer

About the job

Our mission

Boom is on a mission to level the playing field for the 110+ million renters in the US by making housing more flexible, affordable, and rewarding. Boom is building a suite of rental financial services for renters and property managers, including tenant screening, rent payment reporting, rent reporting-as-a-service, and a number of integrations with the largest property management systems (PMS). Boom serves renters through the Boom App and property managers via the Boom Platform. Now serving thousands of renters, Boom is led by second-time founder Rob Whiting (ex-BCG, Rubicon). It's backed by investors such as Starting Line, Clocktower Ventures, Gilgamesh Ventures (Petal co-founders), and angels such as William Hockey and Zach Perret (Co-founders of Plaid) and Harry Stebbings. Boom has been profiled by Inman, Business Insider, HousingWire, and more.

Opportunity

We're expanding our engineering team to meet the growing demands of our B2B partners and B2C users. AI is central to Boom's vision on two fronts. Externally, we're building the agentic operational layer for residential real estate: standalone agents (leasing, application, underwriting) and AI woven across every product. Internally, we use AI to make every team at Boom move faster, from engineering and product to operations, customer success, and sales.

We're looking for an AI Engineer to ship production-grade customer-facing agents, drive Boom's internal AI productivity, and push the state of what AI can do in our space.

This role offers the chance to work closely with our Co-founders, product leadership, and senior engineers, contributing directly to the growth of the company as we move from Seed to Series A and beyond. For this role, we are hiring for candidates in Austin, TX, where our leadership and product team is located. Comp range listed is directional and adjustable +/- based on competency.

Our engineering culture is hands-on and pragmatic -- we value shipping real product, maintaining high standards, and communicating clearly. If you're excited about building agents that handle real customer interactions and revenue-bearing workflows -- not demos -- reach out.

What you'll do

• Ship customer-facing production AI features across Boom's product
• Drive Boom's internal AI productivity: tooling, workflows, and automations that help every team (engineering, operations, customer success, sales) do more with less
• Own the full agent stack: prompts, tools, memory, retrieval, orchestration, evals, and observability
• Build the eval and feedback loops that let us improve agents safely without regressions: offline evals, online metrics, and human review queues
• Partner with product and leadership to pick the right AI bets (customer-facing and internal) and ship them
• Help shape how we hire, how we work with AI, and how we operate as an engineering team

What you'll need

• 5+ years in web development with at least 1-2 years building production LLM features or agents. Hands-on with Anthropic/OpenAI APIs and agent patterns (tool use, structured outputs, RAG, multi-step planning)
• Strong instincts for evals. You've built or owned an eval suite and know the difference between a demo that wows and a system that works at scale
• Product judgment and taste for LLM products. You can articulate what the model shouldn't do, where to put guardrails, when to fall back to deterministic logic, and what UX makes errors tolerable
• Backend-leaning full stack on Ruby and Python (Grape and Sequel) with React/Next.js and TypeScript on the frontend. Comfortable with third-party APIs (OAuth, webhooks, rate limits, idempotency), observability, on-call, and real incidents
• You're already running AI coding agents autonomously, including overnight, to ship. Daily Claude Code use is table stakes
• Plus: voice AI stacks (LiveKit, Deepgram, ElevenLabs), vector stores and retrieval pipelines, AWS, and Terraform
• Strong communicator and self-starter in a fast-paced, early-stage environment. Comfortable championing AI adoption with non-technical teammates and meeting them where they are
• Empathy for our end users, including low-to-moderate-income renters, and a desire to build products that make a difference

Benefits of working at Boom

• Competitive salary with stock options
• Full healthcare coverage (health, dental, vision) including 50% coverage for dependents
• 15 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) per year + 3 sick days + all US federal holidays (11 in total) (note: we think unlimited PTO is BS and causes some employees to feel guilty when they take it)
• Company-issued laptop/MacBook
• Company-sponsored training & development
• Regular off-sites, retreats, and other company-sponsored events and travel opportunities