Understanding Recruitment
Founding Engineer
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Do you have experience working at an early-stage startup and want to do it again, properly this time?
Are you excited by real ownership, commercial impact, and building something genuinely category-defining?
🚀 Founding Engineer (Product-Led 'Generalist') – AI-native Workspace 🚀
- 💰 Salary: £120k - £160k + equity
- 📍 Location: London, Onsite
- 🧠 Experience: 3-8 years (startup / founding engineer background preferred)
We’re partnered with a pre-seed AI startup building agentic AI systems that radically improve how knowledge workers think, decide, and get work done. This is not another chatbot. This is an AI-native product being built from first principles by engineers from elite technical environments (e.g. Palantir, Citadel).
They’re now looking for a Founding Engineer, someone who’s:
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
- Already been a founding / early engineer or
- Worked in a fast-moving, high-growth startup and understands what it takes to ship real product, fast, with users in mind
- Has a generalist mindset
- A strong mathematical background
You’ll work directly on:
- Core agent loops (prompting, tool selection, model choice, memory & context)
- High-performance, real-time LLM-powered UX
- Making autonomous systems reliable enough for daily, mission-critical work
As a Founding Engineer, you’ll wear many hats:
- Backend: Python
- Frontend: TypeScript, React
- AI/LLMs everywhere (Cursor/Copilot as a daily workflow)
- Architectural decisions & trade-offs
- Product thinking & UX judgment
- Talking to users and rapidly iterating
- Full SDLC ownership; build, ship, break, fix, repeat
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
What they’re looking for:
- Strong commercial & product mindset – you care about outcomes, not just code
- Comfortable in ambiguity and zero-to-one environments
- Proven ability to ship fast in small teams
- AI-native way of working (LLMs are tools, not toys)
- Resilient, adaptable, and genuinely excited by hard problems
Why join now?
- Real ownership — technical and product
- Small, elite team that ships fast
- Well-funded with long runway
- You’ll help define a product shaping the next generation of software
- Not another boring B2B Saas… this is something you’d actually use
If you’re ready to step into a true founding-level role, influence the product direction, and build something genuinely new, this is the one. Interested? Apply now! 🚀
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location