Software Engineer (Indianapolis)

About Pulse

Pulse is an AI transformation and custom development firm based in Indianapolis. We work with mid-market companies, usually 50 to 200+ employees, in manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, nonprofits, and government contracting, plus a few enterprise clients.

Most of these companies haven't started with AI because they think they need perfect data and perfectly run operations first. They don't, and our job is to prove it quickly. A lot of our work starts with a 2-Day AI POC: our engineers sit with a client team, learn how the work actually gets done, and ship a working tool while the strategy work is still happening. 98% of our clients renew.

The Role

You'll own client projects from the first conversation to production. That means finding where AI actually saves time or opens up new revenue, deciding the technical plan, building the whole system, and improving it after it goes live. You'll run multiple projects at a time and work within a very flat organizational structure.

This is a software engineering job first. The model is usually the easy part. What makes a project work is everything around it: clean data models, integrations that don't fall over, tests, monitoring, and code another engineer can pick up. We need people who've built and run real systems, and who now use LLMs as one more tool in that work.

Most projects start with a process someone has run the same way for years. You'll map it step by step until every step is simple, figure out which steps AI can take over, build it, keep a person in the loop where mistakes are expensive, and remove that check once the system has earned trust. A project is done when real hours come off someone's workload.

What You'll Do

• Learn a client's process fast, onsite or remote, often in hours instead of weeks
• Decide where AI helps and where it doesn't, and explain that call to a CEO and to their IT lead
• Build the full system: LLM workflows, agents, integrations with the client's ERP, CRM, email, and files, and the interface people use every day
• Write evals so you know when outputs are good enough to trust
• Ship to production and keep improving it once real users are on it
• Help run 2-Day AI POCs, where the goal is a working tool by the end of day two
• Leave something behind on every project (skills, MCP connectors, eval sets, templates) so the next one starts ahead

What You Won't Do Here

• Sit through three hours of status meetings every Monday
• Wait six weeks for a code review
• Watch your work die in a change management committee
• Babysit a single legacy system for two years
• Write specs for someone else to build

What We're Looking For

• At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience. This is a hard minimum. We want software engineers who can scale with AI, not prompters who pretend to be software engineers.
• You've owned production systems: designed them, shipped them, been on the hook when they broke, and fixed them
• Strong fundamentals in system design, data modeling, testing, and debugging
• Deep experience in Python or TypeScript (ideally both), building and consuming APIs, and working with relational databases like Postgres
• Comfortable deploying and running software in the cloud, including CI/CD, logging, and monitoring
• You've built something on top of LLMs that real people use, and you know the ways it breaks
• Hands-on experience with Claude Code, MCP servers, or agent frameworks
• You can explain a technical decision to a CEO in plain English and to an engineer in full detail
• You like being in front of clients. A big part of this job is listening.
• You'll tell a client something won't work before you build it anyway

Nice to Have

• Integrations with ERPs (Odoo, NetSuite), CRMs (HubSpot), or accounting tools (QuickBooks)
• Consulting, agency, or founder experience
• Background in manufacturing, healthcare, or financial services

What You'll Learn Here

• How to structure work so agents can do it reliably
• Context engineering, meaning how to give a model the right information at the right moment
• How to evaluate outputs and decide where people stay in control
• How to scope work, build a roadmap, and run a client relationship yourself

How We Work

Our values are Unwavering Integrity, Trailblazing Creativity, and Speed as Superpower. In practice:

• We tell clients the truth, including when the answer is don't use AI for this
• We try things that haven't been done in a client's industry yet
• We price work off roadmaps instead of hours, so nobody is rewarded for stretching a project out. If it can ship in 3 months instead of 6, it ships in 3.
• We keep the team small on purpose. You'll own more, see more of the business, and your work will be visible to clients and leadership.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary, commensurate with experience
• Equity in Pulse
• Health, dental, vision
• PTO we actually want you to take
• A real desk in a real office with people who make you better
• Direct access to founders. Sean (CEO) and Jake (COO) are in the trenches with you, not behind a calendar wall.

Details

• Location: Onsite at our office, 350 Massachusetts Ave #256, Indianapolis, IN 46204
• Travel: This position will require travel to client sites