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CAREERS

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  • In energy infrastructure/construction there are two players:

    • Owners/Operators like Shell, SABIC, Meta who need assets built

    • EPCs like Worley, Burns & McDonnell, McDermott who design and deliver them

     

    These construction projects cover projects like process plants, data centers, and nuclear facilities. Different in form, but in essence the same: large, self-sustaining systems. To us, a data-center is less of a structural building and more of a large refrigerator.

     

    Unlike civil infrastructure (buildings, structures, roads), energy infrastructure projects resemble building a city. They generate power, sustain utilities, and underpin the digital economy (including the compute that powers most AI infrastructure)

     

    Timelines are the choke point. A typical construction project lasts four years, with the first two consumed entirely by pre-construction (bidding, engineering, procurement). Two years before the first nail hits the ground. We want to collapse this pre-construction timeline.

  • Engineering today is buried under its own weight. Thousands of documents, most of them diagrams, inconsistent and error-prone. Engineers spend their days dragging, clicking, and retyping the same information across systems. Mistakes slip through constantly, and every error costs real money.

     

    Communication is just as bad. Emails take days to get answered, and that delay is treated as normal. Phone calls are discouraged because they leave no record. Critical decisions crawl through clogged inboxes while schedules slip further.

     

    The sheer volume of work means the long tail never gets done. Small but important tasks pile up, left behind until they become crises. Deadlines pass, revisions mount, and entire teams are stuck firefighting instead of building.

  • This is the system we rely on for the infrastructure that powers the world. It is fragile, wasteful, and unsustainable. Today only 1 in 200 energy projects finish on time and budget. 

     

    Our mission is simple: collapse these timelines and free engineers to build the infrastructure the world actually needs. 

     

    By building 2× faster and 25% cheaper, we:

    • Save this $2T industry, billions of wasted engineering hours 

    • Start construction a year earlier, finish a year earlier, and unlock an extra year of revenue (typically $100M/year/project)

    • Make new projects feasible and accelerate clean-tech adoption

WORKING AT CANDID

We are not building a normal company. We’ve done that before. In the AI era there is a better way. We will cap headcount at 10 until we reach $100M in revenue. It might not be possible, but we will try. To do that:

 

  • We don’t hire employees, we hire partners. Partners are self-directed, self-managed, and share equal control over strategy.

  • We hire rarely and carefully, with unanimous consent. Only proven top performers with strong references. No managers, only builders. Ten 10× builders with 10× automation can match 1,000 people.

  • Human time is precious. We automate everything we can. Meetings happen only when vital. We are default remote, but gather when it is worth it. We plan to have an in-person presence in Houston to stay close to customers.

  • As partners, everyone is compensated highly and equally. Success is shared directly through profit-sharing. Excellence is expected and rewarded.

MOMENTUM

Startups sell to three groups: investors, customers, and talent. We have de-risked all three.

 

Fundraising: Raised $5.5M in under a week, backed by investors of OpenAI and xAI.

Customers: POCs with leading EPCs, and clear success metrics to beat pilot purgatory.

Talent: Supported by world-class angels including Yann LeCun, Carnegie Mellon alumni, and MIT’s E14 Fund.

 

We’ve cleared the early hurdles (or rather, distractions) so you can focus on solving the biggest challenges.

OPEN ROLES

If you’re interested in joining us, alongside your resume, tell us about the most impressive thing you have built. Send us an email at join[at]candidintelligence[dot]com. 

 

We’re looking for partners who want to build for building’s sake. Every partner is a full-stack builder, first, but also has, either by experience or passion, expertise that augments the rest of the team. We're looking for partners with expertise in the following areas:

INGESTION

North Star: read every engineering drawing. Build systems that can read P&IDs, isometrics, and plot plans. Handle messy scans, warped lines, tiny text, and inconsistent symbols. Extract meaning from thousands of PDFs with vision and language models that work as reliably as humans, only at scale.

REPRESENTATION

North Star: 100% accurate on-prem retrieval. Every bid involves thousands of documents and hundreds of pages. Accuracy beats speed. Build ontologies and knowledge graphs that turn messy folders into structured, trusted sources of truth. Security is absolute. Data never leaves customer servers.

ORCHESTRATION

North Star: real-time multi-agent systems. Pre-construction has dozens of steps across tools and teams. Build agents that reconcile inconsistencies, chase missing information, and even operate legacy ERP or scheduling software through the interface. Transparent, auditable, with humans in the loop.

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