Shovels

Join Our Team

Come build the intelligence layer for the built world.

// national signal

The whole country, lighting up.

Four datasets underpin everything we build: government meeting decisions, permits, addresses, and parcels. Across thousands of US jurisdictions, every dot is a metro; each flare is a signal firing, a council rezoning or a permit filed, often months before the building exists. Zoom into any one and we trace it from the first vote to the last inspection.

Illustrative animation. Dots reflect real permit volume by metro; the flares stand in for the live signal stream, government decisions and permits.

// signal lifecycle

We see it before it's built.

The built world starts as a line item in a government meeting. We capture that decision, then follow it into the ground: the rezoning, the plat, the permits, the build. Watch one go from a vote to the keys.

 
decision · approval · permit · construction · complete
 
Illustrative. Built from real Shovels signal types: planning decisions, plats, permits, and inspections.

About Shovels

Every building permit is a signal that someone is about to spend money on the built world, and the council decision that greenlit it comes months earlier. We index both, plus the addresses and parcels underneath, across thousands of government systems in formats nobody ever agreed on, and turn the raw paper trail into intelligence: who is building what, where, and how well.

A trillion-dollar economy runs on construction, and almost none of it is legible in real time. We make it legible, and we get it to the people who move first on it: the analysts, operators, and companies whose entire business depends on seeing where the built world is heading next. That's the intelligence layer for the built world, and we're the ones building it. Backed by multi-million-dollar VC funding and a growing customer base, going after one of the largest and least-structured data problems left.

What started as two people with a big vision is now a small team of engineers and data obsessives spread across the globe. Still scrappy, still all-in.

Open Positions

Senior Data & Platform Engineer

Remote · Read access: agents only

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Senior Full-Stack Product Engineer

Remote · Read access: agents only

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Why Shovels?

How We Work

We run on a written-first operating system, and not as ideology: engineering in Europe, business in the US, so anything that matters survives a 24-hour round trip in writing. Meetings are for decisions, not updates. Beyond that, how we work is deliberately light and always provisional: we add a ritual only when a gap actually hurts, and change it the moment reality disagrees. Fully remote, radically transparent, and everyone together in person twice a year. Each open role goes deeper.