Lead Software Engineer

Chicago (On-Site Preferred) • Full-time

Commercial real estate advisory runs on human hours, spreadsheets, and outdated software. We're rebuilding it.

Vestian is a global commercial real estate advisory firm representing the occupier side of every deal: Fortune 500 companies, fast-growing startups, and global enterprises figuring out where and how their people work. Behind every transaction is a sprawl of leases, floor plans, financial models, project plans, and document-heavy workflows that the industry still runs through email and Excel.

This is the lead engineering role on our platform. You'll work as the lead IC on a small team, building the internal tooling our brokers, lease admin teams, and project delivery teams use every day, plus the client-facing products our enterprise customers rely on to manage their global portfolios.

What you'll build

In your first year, you'll likely ship some combination of:

• An AI-powered portfolio management platform for the world's largest enterprise occupiers, replacing the legacy software stack they piece together today
• AI copilots that change how brokers and advisors actually do their best work
• Document and knowledge systems that turn unstructured paperwork into data we can actually query and work with
• Operational tooling that replaces the spreadsheets brokerage and project teams live in today
• Mapping and location intelligence for site selection and portfolio analysis

The roadmap will shift. The work won't: software our services team uses every day, and software our clients depend on to run their portfolios.

Who you are

You've shipped production software for 5+ years and have strong opinions about engineering quality and product experience. You think in workflows and users, not tickets. You enjoy sitting next to a broker or an operations specialist, watching how they actually work, and turning that into software that makes them dramatically more effective. You can move from a blank Figma to deployed code without waiting for someone to spec the problem for you. You've made Cursor, Claude Code, v0, and the rest of the modern AI coding stack a deep part of how you work - not tools you've tried, but a force multiplier you ship with every day.

You're fluent in:

• TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node
• Postgres (we run on Supabase today, but we're not married to it)
• AI-assisted development: you've made Cursor, Claude Code, v0, or similar a core part of your workflow
• Building with LLMs: APIs, RAG, agents, evals
• Cloud deployment (Vercel, AWS, or similar)
• Owning systems end to end: architecture, data model, UI, deployment

You don't need real estate experience. You do need to like working close to operations, not isolated from them.

What we offer

• Founding-level scope: real influence over architecture, tools, hiring, and product direction
• In-office perferred; open to remote for the right person
• Direct partnership with leadership.

Compensation $185,000 - $215,000