Shovels careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Shovels closed a $5 million seed round in June 2025 led by Base10 Partners, bringing total funding to $6.5 million; the earlier capital was raised in small angel and pre-seed increments that CEO Ryan Buckley documented openly in the company's monthly newsletter. The seed announcement cited 180M+ permits processed every month and funds earmarked for data infrastructure, accuracy and geographic coverage.

Shovels turns messy public records about construction into structured intelligence. Everything built starts as a line item in a local government meeting, then becomes a rezoning, a permit, inspections and a finished building; Shovels captures that whole trail, using AI to clean, enrich and unify permit, contractor, property and city council decision data from more than 2,770 US jurisdictions. As of October 2026 its database holds 178M+ building permits and tracks 3.65M+ contractors, delivered through an API, a web app (Shovels Online) and data warehouse shares, with customers across construction, building materials, energy, real estate, insurance and home services. The careers page says it is trusted by some of the largest Fortune 100 companies.

The company was founded in October 2022 by Ryan Buckley and Luka Kacil and is based in Lafayette, California, with the team split deliberately: engineering in Europe, business on the US West Coast. In 2026 it acquired ReZone, which tracks commercial real estate related city council and planning department decisions nationwide, extending Shovels from permits into the zoning and regulatory decisions that precede them.

Ryan Buckley, Co-founder and CEO. A UC Berkeley graduate and serial founder: he co-founded the content marketplace Scripted in 2007 and became its CEO in 2016, then ran app intelligence company MightySignal until its acquisition by Airnow. He started Shovels in October 2022 after his own home remodel exposed how inaccessible permit data is, and writes a candid monthly newsletter that documented the company's fundraising from $610k onward.

Luka Kacil, Co-founder and CTO. Spent a decade building data-intensive systems at scale, including as COO and CTO of AppMonsta, a fully remote, globally distributed mobile data company acquired in 2020. He met Buckley through MightySignal and leads Shovels' engineering team from Europe.

Shovels pitches itself as a place to live the AI frontier rather than read about it: everyone commands a team of agents, the company built its own harness and ships with it daily, and the stated trajectory is one human lead running a mostly-agent team. There is a weekly AI Lab for trading agent workflows and prompt patterns, and all team members lead real projects and help shape how a mostly-agent org gets built.

The company is radically transparent: employees see the financials and the inner workings of the business and help steer it. Work is fully remote and async-friendly with no strict 9-to-5, the whole team meets in person twice a year, and the published offer is competitive salary plus meaningful equity. The Forward Deployed Engineer posting lists $120K+ and meaningful equity; other roles do not publish bands.

Shovels runs on a written-first operating system out of necessity rather than ideology: with engineering in Europe and business in the US, anything that matters has to survive a 24-hour round trip in writing. Meetings are for decisions, not updates. Process is deliberately light and provisional; rituals get added only when a gap actually hurts and changed the moment reality disagrees.

The team describes itself as a small group of engineers and data obsessives spread across the globe, still scrappy, still all-in, going after one of the largest and least-structured data problems left. The build-for-the-customer bar is explicit: a deliverable counts when a customer uses it to make a decision, not when it ships.

As of October 2026 the careers page at https://www.shovels.ai/careers lists five openings: Senior Data & Platform Engineer and Senior Full-Stack Product Engineer (both remote, Americas and Europe), Forward Deployed Engineer (remote, US-based, $120K+ and meaningful equity), Senior Customer Success Manager (remote, West Coast preferred) and Account Executive (hybrid, SF Bay Area). Core engineering hires can be anywhere in the Americas or Europe; the Forward Deployed role is US-based by design because it needs real-time overlap with US customers.

Each role page carries its own application instructions; for the Forward Deployed Engineer, applications go to petra@shovels.ai with a resume, LinkedIn profile and a short note, and the company promises a short process where you hear back either way. Engineering candidates should expect an AI-native bar: the postings want people with earned opinions on harnesses, context and verification from shipped work, strong Python and SQL, and comfort with messy real-world data.