About UNLOCKLAND
UNLOCKLAND is a Singapore-headquartered, AI-native software company building a decision platform for real estate development.
Our platform helps real estate developers discover opportunities, evaluate land, compare development scenarios, and make faster, smarter, and lower-risk investment decisions.
We connect parcel, planning, market, and development evidence to the workflows that turn land into a complete, reviewable opportunity.
Our data coverage currently spans 15 global markets across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Saudi Arabia.
We are expanding rapidly across new markets, deeper data coverage, and more connected development workflows.
About the Role
We are looking for a Founding Engineer with an interdisciplinary background in architecture, urban planning, urban design, or the broader built environment, combined with strong full-stack engineering and AI-native development capabilities.
This is an early, hands-on individual contributor role based in Singapore. You will work directly with the Founder to shape the product, make foundational technical decisions, and build the platform as we expand globally.
You will help turn fragmented planning systems, geospatial data, development regulations, and market information into intuitive, scalable software workflows.
You should be able to take an ambiguous industry problem, turn it into a working product quickly, validate it with users, and then apply the engineering discipline required to make it reliable, secure, maintainable, and scalable.
This is not a role focused only on implementing predefined specifications. You will participate in customer discovery, product design, technical architecture, implementation, deployment, and continuous iteration.
What You'll Do
- Work directly with the Founder to define product priorities, technical architecture, and the engineering roadmap.
- Translate complex real estate development, architecture, and urban planning workflows into intuitive software products.
- Build and ship full-stack features from initial concept through production deployment.
- Develop workflows for land discovery, site evaluation, planning analysis, development scenario comparison, and investment decision support.
- Build AI-powered product capabilities using large language models, structured outputs, retrieval, tool use, agents, and multimodal inputs.
- Work with geospatial, parcel, zoning, planning, market, and development-related data across multiple countries.
- Help normalize different data sources, planning systems, regulatory structures, and development terminology across global markets.
- Create interfaces that make complex spatial and development information easy to understand and act on.
- Build integrations with external data providers, APIs, mapping platforms, and industry software.
- Design and maintain application infrastructure, databases, APIs, authentication, permissions, and background processing.
- Establish practical engineering standards for testing, security, observability, documentation, and deployment.
- Speak directly with customers and turn their workflows and feedback into product improvements.
- Use AI development tools to accelerate research, prototyping, implementation, debugging, testing, and documentation.
- Help establish UNLOCKLAND's early engineering culture and development practices.
What We're Looking For
- Academic or professional experience in architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate development, or a related built-environment field—including hands-on pre-development experience in land acquisition, site selection, development feasibility, underwriting, entitlement, or early-stage project planning.
- A strong understanding of how land, buildings, planning policy, zoning, and real estate development decisions interact.
- Proven software engineering experience, including products or features used by real customers.
- Hands-on full-stack development experience with modern web technologies.
- Experience with technologies such as TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, or comparable tools.
- The ability to independently take a feature from an ambiguous problem through product thinking, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, and iteration.
- Practical experience using AI coding tools as part of a professional or high-quality product development workflow.
- Experience integrating LLM APIs or building AI-powered product features.
- Strong product judgment and an interest in solving user problems, not simply completing technical tasks.
- The ability to evaluate AI-generated code and identify incorrect assumptions, security risks, performance problems, and unnecessary technical debt.
- Familiarity with APIs, databases, authentication, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, testing, and continuous deployment.
- High ownership, personal accountability, and attention to detail.
- Comfort working directly with a Founder in a fast-moving, early-stage company.
- The ability to collaborate effectively in a hybrid working environment.
- Excellent written and spoken English.
You do not need to have used every technology in our stack. We care more about your ability to learn quickly, make sound technical decisions, and consistently ship high-quality products.
What We Mean by AI-Native Development
We expect AI to be part of the daily engineering workflow.
You should be highly effective with tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar AI development environments. You should know how to provide context, decompose problems, evaluate generated code, debug unexpected behaviour, and iterate quickly.
For us, vibe coding does not mean blindly accepting AI-generated code or producing disposable demos. It means using AI to achieve significantly greater development speed while remaining fully accountable for architecture, security, performance, testing, maintainability, and the final user experience.
The right candidate will combine the speed of an AI-native builder with the judgment of an experienced engineer.
Preferred Experience
Experience in one or more of the following areas is highly valuable:
- GIS, spatial databases, geospatial analysis, or web mapping
- Mapbox, Cesium, PostGIS, GeoJSON, or comparable technologies
- Zoning, land-use regulation, development feasibility, or site analysis
- CAD, BIM, Revit, Rhino, Grasshopper, IFC, or computational design
- PropTech, ConTech, architecture technology, or planning technology
- Real estate development or land acquisition workflows
- AI agents, tool calling, RAG, vector databases, or model evaluation
- Document intelligence and extraction of structured information from reports, policies, drawings, and regulatory documents
- Data visualisation and complex decision-support interfaces
- International data products or software operating across multiple regulatory markets
- Early-stage startups or independently launched software products
Our Hiring Principle
We hire for interdisciplinary thinking, engineering judgment, learning ability, ownership, user curiosity, and execution.
We value people who can understand both the physical world and the software systems used to analyse it.
We can deepen your understanding of our platform, data, and real estate development workflows. We cannot teach intellectual honesty, accountability, curiosity, or the determination to move difficult problems forward.
What Success Looks Like
Success in this role will be measured by:
- The speed at which important product ideas become usable customer-facing features
- Product quality, reliability, security, and maintainability
- Adoption and measurable value created for customers
- The ability to turn complex industry workflows into simple product experiences
- Effective use of AI to increase engineering velocity
- Technical decisions that support continued product and geographic expansion
- Responsiveness to customer learning and product feedback
- Ownership of outcomes rather than completion of assigned tasks
Why Join UNLOCKLAND
- Join a Singapore-based AI company addressing one of the most important challenges in global real estate development.
- Build an AI-native platform connected to high-value land, investment, and development decisions.
- Work on a global data product already covering 15 markets and expanding rapidly.
- Work directly with the Founder and have meaningful influence over the product and company.
- Help define a new category of software for the built environment.
- Shape the technical architecture, engineering culture, and product development process from an early stage.
- Work across AI, geospatial technology, architecture, urban planning, and real estate development.
- Use modern AI development tools as a core part of your daily workflow.
• Receive competitive compensation and meaningful early-stage equity participation.
