Architect Designer (3-month Contract)

Architect (3-month Contract)

3-month Contract Position for a Construction Tech Venture

The Short Version

You're a trained architect who'd rather teach software to design a thousand houses than draw one more by hand. The founder built the engine. You'll build everything it produces.

What Liminal Is

A Founders Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders Studio because venture studio undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

This role is part of a new generation of residential development, built to attack the housing crisis at its root. With a full stack of software and hardware, this construction tech venture turns floor plans into structures that arrive assembly-ready. Not renderings. Not concepts. Homes.

You'll be the founder's first technical hire. The core technical structure is done. What remains is the part most architects would recognize as the actual job: floor plans, interiors, the infinite permutations of how people want to live. Infinite is the operative word. Right now, every permutation costs the founder time he should be spending closing commercial deals.

Your job is to take over the design layer and then make it scale. Not by drawing faster. By building the systems, libraries, and AI-driven workflows that let one architect do the work of a studio. You'll spend as much time directing Claude Code as you do in design software, and you should find that thrilling rather than threatening.

This is not a CAD-monkey role with a startup logo on it. It's a bet that the next great residential architect is part designer, part toolmaker.

The Work

• Design at scale. Develop floor plans, interior layouts, and design variations across Buildworld's residential portfolio. Build the libraries and parametric logic that turn one good plan into a hundred buildable ones.
• AI-native workflows. Use Claude Code daily to automate permutations, generate variations, and compress what used to take a week into an afternoon. You write the prompts, build the tools, and own the output quality.
• Design-to-assembly translation. Make sure what gets designed can actually be manufactured and assembled. Every line you draw has a downstream consequence in steel, timber, and freight.
• Founder leverage. Absorb the design workload so the founder can live in commercial conversations. The measure of your success: how rarely he has to open the design files.

Who You Are

• A trained architect. Mid-career. You've done real projects, dealt with real clients, and carry the scar tissue of real construction timelines. You know why buildings cost what they cost.
• Fluent in the tools. Revit, Rhino, ArchiCAD, Grasshopper, whatever your weapons of choice. Second nature, not learning curve.
• Dangerous with Claude Code. Not I've tried ChatGPT. You direct AI coding tools with precision, debug what they produce, and know when to trust the output and when to tear it up. This is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.
• Done with the old way. You believe the industry designs and constructs houses roughly the way it did in 1985, and you'd like to be one of the people who ends that. Conviction, not cynicism.
• Self-propelled. Remote role, lean team, founder heads-down on deals. Nobody will hand you a brief every Monday. You see what needs designing, design it, and report back.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.

Unicorn Points If

You are a senior architect at a large firm who automated half your own job and got bored instead of promoted. A computational designer who keeps explaining to partners why the practice should change and keeps getting nodded at politely. An architect who left the profession for tech and has been waiting for a reason to come back.

The Contract

Three months. Embedded directly with the founder on a live venture with real stakes. Not redlining drawings. Not rendering someone else's vision. If you've been looking for the place where architecture and AI finally stop circling each other, this is the door.