Principal Agentic AI Engineer

Hover helps people design, improve, and protect the properties they love. With proprietary AI built on over a decade of real property data, Hover answers age-old questions like “What will it look like?” and “What will it cost?” Homeowners, contractors, and insurance professionals rely on Hover to get fully measured, accurate, and interactive 3D models of any property — all from a smartphone scan in minutes.

At Hover, we’re driven by curiosity, purpose, and a shared commitment to serving our customers, communities, and each other. We believe the best ideas come from diverse perspectives and are proud to cultivate an inclusive, high-performance culture that inspires growth, accountability, and excellence. Backed by leading investors like Google Ventures and Menlo Ventures, and trusted by industry leaders including Travelers, State Farm, and Nationwide — we’re redefining how people understand and interact with their spaces.

Why Hover wants you

Hover has one of the richest 3D property datasets on the planet. Millions of structures captured, with sub-inch precision and used by major insurance carriers and construction companies today. The next step is building autonomous systems that can perform inspections, damage assessments, design, and cost estimations with speed, accuracy, and operational trust at scale. We’ve already validated the direction. This role is responsible for taking Hover from “we’ve proven it works” to “it runs accurately and reliably at scale.”

We’re hiring a Principal Agentic AI Engineer to lead the architecture, technical strategy, and operational rigor behind our next generation of autonomous systems. This is a deeply hands-on technical leadership role where you’ll stay close to architecture, evaluation systems, debugging, and critical implementation details while helping define the future of agentic AI at Hover.

You’ll work at the intersection of:

• multi-agent orchestration,

• agentic systems reliability,

• human-in-the-loop operational design,

• and enterprise-grade AI trust.

If you want to help define how an entire industry transitions from manual workflows to autonomous systems, this role is for you.

You will contribute by

Agentic System Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Design and evolve Hover’s multi-agent architecture, including orchestration, handoff logic, retry/fallback systems, observability, and state management.

• Define the boundary between deterministic systems and LLM-driven reasoning by deciding when the model should reason versus when the system should enforce.

• Build confidence-tier systems, escalation paths, and auditability frameworks that allow enterprise customers to trust autonomous outputs.

• Stay hands-on with critical technical challenges, debugging pipelines and improving production reliability.

Evaluation, Product & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Build evaluation frameworks that define what is “good enough to ship,” including regression detection, customer-specific acceptance criteria, and operational benchmarking.

• Partner closely with Product and Design to shape the UX of autonomy — confidence thresholds, override logic, checkpoints, and collaborator workflows.

• Translate business intent into pragmatic engineering plans and represent engineering clearly in leadership discussions.

• Bring clarity and momentum to ambiguous technical and operational problems.

Team & Organizational Leadership

• Set and execute the 6–12 month technical roadmap for agentic AI at Hover.

• Coach engineers and senior ICs to think in systems, operate with product rigor, and ship reliable production software.

• Raise the engineering bar around operational excellence, architecture quality, and delivery discipline.

Your background includes

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership of complex production systems.

• Experience building and shipping production AI systems under real customer load and reliability expectations.

• Deep systems-thinking capability across reliability, observability, failure modes, state management, and graceful degradation.

• Strong product judgment around what to automate versus where humans should remain in the loop.

• Clear technical opinions on the boundary between deterministic systems and LLM-driven reasoning.

• Exceptional communication skills, including technical design docs and executive-level tradeoff discussions.

• A passion for mentoring engineers and building strong, collaborative teams.

Strong Signals

• Experience in regulated or high-trust domains such as insurance, fintech, healthcare, or legal.

• Experience with confidence scoring, self-healing systems, critique-loop architectures, or AI evaluation frameworks.

• Background as a founding engineer, principal engineer, or technical lead within an AI-native company.

• Strong distributed systems or platform engineering foundations that evolved into applied AI leadership.

Benefits

• Compensation - Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a fast-growing company

• Healthcare - Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents

• Paid Time Off - Unlimited and flexible vacation policy

• Paid Family Leave - We support work/life balance and offer generous paid parental and new child bonding leave

• Mandatory Self-Care Days - A day set aside each month to allow employees to recharge

• Remote Wellbeing Resources - We provide recurring fitness classes, meditation/ mindfulness tools, virtual therapy, and family planning assistance

• Learning - We encourage continued education and will help cover the cost of management training, conferences, workshops, or certifications

Hybrid roles at Hover

Hover has Hubs in San Francisco and New York City, where we expect that all employees living within a 50-mile radius of our offices will come into their local Hover office at least three times a week to build rapport and foster organic connection. At this time, Hover is not considering fully remote roles.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $274,000 - $338,000 annually. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all applicable US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

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