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Founding Engineer (AI Start-up)
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Founding Engineer
Most engineering roles hand you someone else's architecture, a backlog of legacy decisions and a ticket queue. This one hands you a blank-ish canvas, a working early product, and the job of deciding how it should be built over the coming years.
This early-stage, AI-native company is building agentic software: AI that works in the background on a user's behalf, pulling context from the tools they already use and acting on it. There's a product live with real users, a founder who has built and funded a tech company before, and a set of hard engineering problems that haven't been solved yet. That's where you come in.
We're looking for a Founding Engineer to own the technology end to end.
The engineering problems
- Agents in production: multi-step AI workflows that act autonomously and reliably, not chatbots
- Real-time and voice: low-latency conversational AI and live data flowing through the system
- Recommendation and ranking: matching logic that has to be accurate, explainable and get better with every interaction
- Integrations: connecting cleanly to email, calendars, messaging and third-party APIs
- Evals and guardrails: building the testing and evaluation layer that makes AI output trustworthy enough to act on
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What you'll do
- You'll own the architecture and technical roadmap, working directly with the CEO.
- You'll be hands-on most of the time: choosing the tools, setting the engineering standards, and shipping fast into the hands of real users.
- As the company grows, you'll hire and lead the team, shaping its culture.
What we're looking for
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered products or agent workflows into production
- Strong full-stack TypeScript and React, with serverless and real-time cloud infrastructure
- A practical approach to AI evaluation, testing and reliability
- Someone who likes owning outcomes, making calls with incomplete information, and shipping quickly
- Bonus points for voice AI, ranking or recommendation systems, or previous founding-engineer experience
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Why it's worth a look
- £100,000 base plus founding equity
- Greenfield where it counts, with the core engine still to be designed by you
- Your choice of tools and approach, with no legacy stack to inherit
- A short path from idea to production, with real users giving feedback quickly
- Work directly with an experienced, previously funded founder
- Hybrid working, London-based
- Build and lead the engineering team from day one
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Jessica, London
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