Founding Engineer, Virtual Inspection

Location: Bay Area preferred (hybrid); open to strong remote candidates within California. About Us SolarAPP is cutting the costs of the clean energy transition, making it so that everyone can afford to power their lives with clean energy. Our automated plan review and permitting software reduces soft costs by turning a weeks-long bureaucratic process into instant approval. We're already deployed in over 500 cities across 17 states, with more than 150,000 permits issued, representing over 800,000 kW of clean energy. We're growing fast to expand our impact, developing Virtual Inspection: an end-to-end capability to verify and approve completed installations through photo and video evidence rather than in-person visits. This unlocks the second half of the residential clean energy permitting and inspection bottleneck and serves governments and contractors with a complete solution for streamlining electrification projects. About the Role We are hiring a Founding Engineer to lead the technical build of SolarAPP+'s new Virtual Inspection product. You will own the engineering foundation for a new product line: how installers submit visual evidence from a rooftop, how that evidence is verified as trustworthy, and how AI accelerates the local government inspector's review of it. This is a zero-to-one role with immediate, massive impact on accelerating approvals of electrification projects across the country. You will partner closely with the CTO and the Head of Product, Virtual Inspection to shape both the product and the platform. You'll collaborate with the nation's largest solar battery installers, local government officials, and the broader SolarAPP engineering and product team. You will be the first engineer dedicated full-time to Virtual Inspection, and you'll help grow the team from here. You will hit the ground running to quickly get a production-grade MVP in the hands of our partners. We have jurisdiction partners lined up and eager to use the product; your work will be in front of real government inspectors and field installers within weeks of your start date. You’re comfortable working with high degrees of ambiguity and are able to fully own and ship entire products at a production grade. This is an incredible opportunity to build a fully funded product, from the ground up, with the opportunity to shape the clean energy industry in the US. This role is ideal for a senior product engineer who wants high ownership, a meaningful mission, and a problem that requires real technical judgment across the stack. Reports to: Head of Product, Virtual Inspection What You'll Do This is a founding role. You'll build the first generation of the Virtual Inspection product, set the engineering foundation other engineers will build on, and help grow the team that scales it. You will: Build the first version of Virtual Inspection, end to end. Work across the stack to ship the product from zero. Our permitting platform runs on Laravel and Vue on AWS with Postgres; you'll work with our CTO to determine where we can consume existing services and leverage our existing platform, and where we should be building greenfield. Partner with the CTO and Head of Product to shape the product and the platform. Help frame what we're building, how we're building it, and how we roll it out. Bring strong opinions, hold them loosely, and align with the broader SolarAPP team on the decisions that matter. Help build the engineering team for Virtual Inspection. Contribute to hiring, mentor engineers as they join, and shape the engineering culture and practices for this product line. As the team grows, you’ll be a natural technical leader within it. Wear many hats and move fast. You'll work on infrastructure, mobile and web apps, AI tooling, and more. You'll pick up unfamiliar problems and trade off scope, quality, and speed without losing sight of any of them. Build a rock-solid foundation. This product supports critical workflows with life and safety implications; building inspectors rely on inspection to catch major defects that save lives. You'll build the product that lets them do that, reliably. What You Bring Essential Skills and Background 10+ years of experience building and supporting production SaaS applications. Experience working across the full technology stack, from front‑end UI to cloud infrastructure. Experience building on AWS (used at SolarAPP) or other cloud platforms; you know how to debug these when things go wrong and have opinions on how to architect for long‑term maintainability and scalability. Experience as a founder or very early engineer at a startup or similar zero-to-one product. Experience supporting live systems, debugging issues, and performing root cause analysis. Fluent with modern AI development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor, and experienced integrating with AI APIs (LLMs, vision models) in production. Comfort collaborating with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders to shape product decisions. Strong sense of ownership and the judgment to lead engineering on a zero-to-one product line. You’re a California resident (this role is grant funded and requires this), ideally able to work in the South Bay. Additional Preferred Skills and Background Experience with an MVC framework such as Laravel (used at SolarAPP), Ruby on Rails, Django, or similar. Experience working in government technology, clean energy, or other regulated industries where chain‑of‑custody and audit trails matter. Background or familiarity with mobile capture flows, computer vision pipelines, or content authenticity (any form: media forensics, content credentials, provenance). Experience on small engineering teams (fewer than 6 engineers) supporting production software. Experience building modern front‑end interfaces using frameworks like Vue or React (or native). Experience building mobile‑first or field‑service capture interfaces. Compensation and Benefits This is a full‑time role with a competitive salary ranging from $185,000 to $205,000, commensurate with experience. We offer a competitive benefits package, including: 401(k) with 5% employer match Employer‑paid short and long‑term disability, and life insurance Unlimited paid time off (PTO) Parental leave $75 monthly internet stipend $500 work‑from‑home stipend for each new hire #J-18808-Ljbffr