Connect-AI
Founding Engineer
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Founding Engineer — AI, Backend & Real-Time Systems
London | £70k - £150k+ meaningful founding equity
I’m working with a well-funded London start-up building the real-time control layer for complex physical operations.
They’re starting with aviation, where their platform is already live at a major international airport — helping coordinate people, equipment and operational workflows as conditions change in real time.
Following a $3.3m pre-seed raise and strong global commercial demand, they’re now building a small founding engineering team to take the product through its next stage of growth.
This is not a narrow backend, AI or full-stack role.
You’ll work directly with the founders, go deep into live customer operations, ship quickly and turn what you learn onsite into reusable product capability.
What you’ll be doing
- Building real-time systems used within live airport operations
- Designing scalable backend services, workflow engines and operational tooling
- Developing agentic AI that can reason, take actions and interact with external systems
- Working across Python, TypeScript, AWS and PostgreSQL
- Improving reliability, observability, CI/CD and production infrastructure
- Visiting customer sites to understand how work actually happens
- Translating messy operational requirements into simple, reusable software
- Owning major product areas from initial idea through deployment and iteration
- Helping establish the engineering culture, standards and architecture from day one
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What they’re looking for
You’ll likely have experience as a:
- Founding Engineer, early engineer or technical founder
- Backend, full-stack, AI or forward-deployed engineer
- Product-minded engineer within an early-stage start-up
- Engineer who has shipped production systems into demanding customer environments
Strong experience in several of the following would be ideal:
- Python and/or TypeScript
- Backend architecture and distributed systems
- AWS, PostgreSQL, Docker and CI/CD
- Event-driven systems, orchestration or state machines
- Agentic AI, LLM workflows, tool calling or RAG
- Scheduling, forecasting, optimisation or resource allocation
- Production monitoring, incident response and high-availability systems
- Customer-facing implementation or forward-deployed engineering
You do not need aviation experience.
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Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
They care far more about speed, ownership, curiosity and your ability to learn a complex operational environment quickly.
You’ll probably enjoy this if you
- Prefer building over discussing building
- Can ship an effective first version and improve it rapidly
- Want genuine influence over product and technical direction
- Are comfortable moving between code, architecture and customer conversations
- Enjoy solving problems where software interacts with the physical world
- Want meaningful ownership rather than joining a large, layered engineering organisation
Package
- Flexible and highly competitive salary
- Meaningful founding equity, potentially up to approximately 1.3% for exceptional hires
- Direct access to the founders
- Huge ownership across product, architecture and company direction
- London-based, with time split between the Regent’s Park office and customer sites
This is a rare chance to join while the technical foundations are still being shaped, but with a live product, funded runway and genuine commercial traction already in place.
Interested? Apply directly or message me confidentially for more information.
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