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Engineering Lead
Build the Technical Foundation for the Intelligence Layer of the World's Physical Economy
Location: London (Preferred), Dubai or San Francisco
Reports to: Founder & CEO
About Smart Bricks
Smart Bricks is building the intelligence layer for the world's physical economy. Every year, trillions of dollars are allocated across real estate, infrastructure, energy and other real assets using fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual processes. We're changing that.
We're building an AI-native platform that enables investors, developers, governments and Fortune 500 companies to make faster, better and more explainable decisions across the entire lifecycle of physical assets.
Our ambition isn't simply to build another SaaS platform. We're building the technology platform that powers the world's leading Applied AI Lab for real assets. Every customer deployment improves the platform. Every workflow becomes reusable. Every capability compounds.
The Opportunity
We're looking for an Engineering Lead to architect and build the technical foundation of Smart Bricks' institutional platform.
This is not a role where you'll inherit hundreds of engineers, mature systems or years of technical debt.
You'll be joining at the point where the platform is being created.
You'll define the architecture. You'll establish the engineering culture. You'll recruit the founding engineering team. You'll make technical decisions that shape the company for the next decade. You'll work directly alongside the Founder, the Product Lead, and the Head of Applied AI to build a platform capable of serving the world's largest institutions.
Your Mission
Build the technical platform that enables Smart Bricks to transform institutional knowledge into software.
Our platform must enable us to:
- Deploy AI into complex enterprise workflows.
- Capture institutional intelligence.
- Build reusable agentic capabilities.
- Scale from bespoke customer deployments into repeatable products.
- Deliver enterprise-grade reliability, security and performance.
Your mission is not simply to build software.
Your mission is to build the infrastructure that allows intelligence to compound.
What You'll Build
Build the Engineering Organisation
- Recruit and lead the founding engineering team.
- Establish an engineering culture built around:
- Ownership
- Simplicity
- Speed
- Craftsmanship
- Pragmatism
- Continuous learning
- Define hiring standards, engineering principles and development practices that scale with the company.
- Build an environment where exceptional engineers want to do the best work of their careers.
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Design the Platform Architecture
- Design the technical foundation powering our institutional platform.
This includes:
- Agent orchestration
- Knowledge infrastructure
- Retrieval systems
- Workflow engines
- APIs
- Enterprise integrations
- Evaluation infrastructure
- Observability
- Security
- Deployment infrastructure
- Your architecture should enable rapid experimentation without compromising long-term scalability.
Build AI-Native Infrastructure
- Traditional SaaS architecture is not enough.
You'll build infrastructure specifically designed for AI-native products, including:
- Agent execution frameworks
- Memory systems
- Evaluation pipelines
- Human-in-the-loop workflows
- Tool orchestration
- Context management
- Multi-agent coordination
- Enterprise-grade deployment
- You'll continuously evaluate emerging technologies while maintaining a pragmatic approach to adoption.
Partner With Applied AI
- Engineering and Applied AI should operate as one continuous system. You'll work closely with the VP of Applied AI to identify reusable capabilities emerging from customer deployments. Every bespoke deployment should raise one question: "What belongs in the core platform?"
- Your team is responsible for turning those answers into scalable infrastructure.
Build for Enterprise Scale
- Our customers will trust us with mission-critical workflows.
You'll ensure the platform is:
- Secure by design
- Reliable
- Observable
- Explainable
- Performant
- Extensible
- You'll establish engineering standards appropriate for enterprise customers operating at global scale.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first 12 months you will have:
- Designed and launched the first version of our institutional platform.
- Built the founding engineering team.
- Established engineering standards and development practices.
- Created a scalable AI infrastructure capable of supporting multiple enterprise deployments.
- Reduced the effort required to onboard new enterprise customers by converting bespoke work into reusable platform capabilities.
- Built an engineering culture recognised for exceptional quality and execution.
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Who We're Looking For
We're looking for builders.
Not managers of large engineering organisations.
You have built products from zero to one.
You've made foundational architectural decisions.
You've hired exceptional engineers.
You've worked closely with product teams and customer-facing organisations.
You are comfortable moving between strategic technical discussions and writing production code.
You likely have experience building:
- AI-native applications
- Developer platforms
- Distributed systems
- Workflow engines
- Knowledge systems
- Enterprise software
- Infrastructure products
Experience in real estate is not required.
Curiosity, technical excellence and strong engineering judgement are.
Ideal Background
We'd love to speak with engineers who have built products or platforms at organisations such as:
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Palantir
- Hebbia
- Anduril
- Scale AI
- Cursor
- Retool
- Databricks
- Snowflake
- Figma
- Stripe
- Vercel
- Linear
- Notion
We're far more interested in what you've built than the logo on your CV.
Leadership Principles
You'll thrive in this role if you:
- Default to action.
- Think in systems rather than features.
- Care deeply about engineering craftsmanship.
- Build simple solutions to complex problems.
- Hire people better than yourself.
- Believe speed and quality can coexist.
- Embrace ownership.
- Prefer solving customer problems over chasing technology trends.
Why Join
Few engineers get the opportunity to define the technical architecture of a category-defining AI company.
This role offers exactly that.
You'll work directly with the founder and founding leadership team to build the platform underpinning one of the most ambitious Applied AI companies in the world.
Your decisions will influence every product we build, every customer we serve and every engineer who joins after you.
If you're excited about building AI infrastructure that transforms how the world's largest institutions make decisions, we'd love to hear from you.
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