Proposals win work but burn senior hours. We're fixing that.
What we believe
- Engineers should review technical work, not copy/paste templates.
- Compliance is non-negotiable.
- Your data stays yours.
Who we're building for
Small-to-mid engineering and consulting firms—environmental, civil, structural, geotechnical, water, and transportation.
Team
We are a team of engineers, builders, and founders who are passionate about helping engineers and consultants win more bids and spend more time doing the work they love. Based in San Francisco.
Jackie Chen is an engineer by training and a company builder by background. He began his career in engineering and built two businesses in college before spending a decade investing in infrastructure, construction, and climate technology.
As a venture investor, he worked closely with founders building software for operationally complex and regulated industries, including Monograph (operating system for architects) and Worldly (ESG and sustainability data platform). Across more than 30 investments, he partnered directly with founders navigating growth, margin pressure, and the realities of scaling workflow-heavy businesses.
Over time, he became increasingly focused on the operating reality inside engineering and consulting firms: how proposals are assembled, how senior engineers are pulled into non-billable work, and how administrative load limits growth more than technical capacity.
That is what led him to start Buoyant.
Today, Jackie works directly with engineering and consulting firms to modernize proposal and documentation workflows. His focus is practical: protect senior billable time, improve consistency and defensibility, and help firms grow backlog without expanding overhead.
Eric brings nearly a decade of experience building AI systems and large-scale production services. His work spans retrieval and ranking, LLM orchestration, and the backend infrastructure that keeps outputs fast, reliable, and auditable in real-world enterprise workflows.
At Amazon Prime Video, he worked on large-scale services powering real-time playback and recommendation workflows. The systems he helped deliver supported 200M+ daily streams and 200k+ TPS, while contributing to 99.999% availability and roughly $5M in annual efficiency gains.
Operating in a dependency-heavy production environment reinforced a security-first engineering approach: strict data access boundaries, resilient failure handling, and clear auditability under pressure. He designs systems with the assumption that sensitive data and customer trust are both mission-critical.
At Buoyant, he applies that same approach to AI-powered proposals and workflows for engineering and consulting firms, improving quality and speed without trading off control. He is the engineer teams rely on when the work involves sensitive client information and firm reputation is on the line.
Where we're going
Proposals are just the starting point. Over time, Buoyant will grow into the operational workflows that surround winning and delivering engineering work—always embedded in the tools your team already uses.