Why We Don't Hire for Affordable Housing Experience — and What We Hire for Instead
We're building software for affordable housing developers. Our users have deep, specific domain expertise. We care a lot about getting the domain details right.
We don't require affordable housing experience from most of the people we hire. That might seem like a contradiction. It's not.
The case for domain experience
There are positions at Alpha Deal where existing affordable housing knowledge genuinely matters and accelerates ramp time. Our Head of Housing Development brings $500M+ in affordable housing experience that shapes how we think about program logic, feasibility modeling, and what practitioners actually need. That expertise is irreplaceable and it directly improves what we build.
For some product and engineering roles, domain familiarity also helps. An engineer who already understands what LIHTC is, why capital stacks are complex, and what makes a QAP hard to navigate can contribute to product decisions faster than someone starting from zero.
Why we don't require it
Requiring affordable housing experience would significantly narrow the talent pool in ways that aren't justified by the actual learning curve.
The domain is learnable. Not quickly, and not without effort — affordable housing development involves real complexity that takes time to internalize. But a smart, curious person who works closely with our domain experts and our practitioner users will develop working knowledge of the domain within several months. The learning curve is real but not prohibitive.
Domain experience doesn't substitute for engineering craft or product judgment. The skills that make engineers productive — systems thinking, code quality, debugging rigor — aren't developed through affordable housing knowledge. A mediocre engineer who knows affordable housing isn't more useful than a strong engineer who doesn't, once the strong engineer is up to speed.
Domain insularity is a real risk. Teams made up entirely of people who came from a single industry can develop blind spots that insiders don't catch. Some of the best product insights at Alpha Deal have come from team members who, precisely because they didn't take the domain's conventions for granted, asked questions that practitioners stopped asking years ago.
What we actually hire for
Intellectual curiosity about the domain. Not existing knowledge, but genuine interest in understanding why the work is hard, what makes the workflow complex, and what good looks like from a practitioner's perspective. The people who ramp fastest are the ones who are genuinely interested in the problem, not the ones who are just trying to learn what they need to do their job.
Comfort with genuine complexity. Affordable housing development involves complexity that resists oversimplification. We need engineers and product people who find that interesting rather than frustrating — who want to understand the nuance, not abstract it away.
Respect for practitioner expertise. Our users know things we don't. That's the nature of building for domain experts. We need people who approach that dynamic as a learning opportunity rather than a constraint — who ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers.
The ability to hold both craft and outcome in mind. We want engineers who care about code quality and engineers who care about whether the software helps developers build housing. These aren't competing priorities, but not everyone holds both simultaneously. We're looking for people who do.
Affordable housing knowledge is welcome. It's not required. What we need is people who will develop that knowledge because they're genuinely motivated by the problem.
We're hiring across engineering and product. If the problem we're working on sounds interesting to you, we'd like to talk.