James Adams
Founding Software Engineer
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Founding Engineer – R&D Prototyping
Fully Remote – UK | Up to £500/day | Outside IR35 | Initial contract to April 2027
About the Role
Build the thing that proves what should be built next.
We’re working with an established, employee-owned B2B SaaS business that is creating a new R&D function to operate more like a start-up studio than a conventional engineering team. This is a genuinely exploratory engineering role.
You’ll identify valuable customer problems, turn them into hypotheses, build rapid prototypes, put those prototypes in front of real users, and use the evidence to decide what deserves to become a product.
This is not a backlog-delivery contract. You won’t be handed a perfectly formed Jira ticket and asked to turn it into production code. You’ll be given an open problem, the freedom to investigate it, and the responsibility to turn uncertainty into something customers can actually react to.
The Environment
The company develops SaaS products within the Salesforce ecosystem, helping organisations manage areas such as routing, work assignment, workflow, and scheduling.
Its established engineering team will continue to build, maintain, and scale the core production platform.
Alongside this, the new R&D team will focus on finding the next problems worth solving. The model is simple: Discover → Prototype → Test → Learn → Decide
The strongest concepts will be handed across to the core product and engineering teams for productionisation. Others will be refined or deliberately discarded.
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What You’ll Do
- Learn the RevOps, CRM, and Salesforce ecosystem deeply enough to identify recurring pain points and emerging opportunities.
- Speak directly with customers, prospects, and practitioners rather than relying solely on second-hand requirements.
- Turn observations into clear, testable hypotheses around the problem, user, and commercial opportunity.
- Build lightweight prototypes, functional spikes, mocked interfaces, and demos — whatever produces useful evidence fastest.
- Use AI-assisted engineering tools to move from an idea to something demonstrable in days rather than months.
- Put concepts in front of users and test genuine behaviour, switching appetite, and commercial value.
- Work out whether to iterate, progress a concept into product development, or stop and pursue something more valuable.
- Document validated concepts clearly enough for another engineering team to turn them into secure, maintainable production software.
- Contribute to the wider technical environment, including Salesforce/Apex, where appropriate.
Success is Learning at Speed
You won’t be judged by how much experimental code survives. You’ll be judged by whether the team learns quickly enough to invest in the right opportunities and avoid spending months building the wrong ones.
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Skills and Experience
- You’ve operated like a founding engineer.
- You’re comfortable when the problem is broad, the answer is unknown, and nobody has written the specification yet.
- You’re commercially curious.
- You want to understand what customers do today, what alternatives they use, what frustrates them, whether they would switch, and whether they would actually pay for something better.
- You use AI as part of modern software engineering.
- You’re comfortable using AI coding and research tools to accelerate experimentation while retaining technical judgement over the output.
- You’re language-agnostic.
- Your strongest experience might be Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or something else entirely. Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly matter more than allegiance to a particular stack.
- You’re comfortable with customers.
- You can ask good questions, challenge assumptions, demonstrate unfinished ideas, and turn feedback into decisions.
Relevant Experience
Any of the following would be particularly relevant:
- Founding Engineer or early-stage engineering experience within B2B SaaS
- Rapid prototyping or product discovery
- Venture building or innovation teams
- Forward Deployed Engineering
- Applied AI / LLM products
Please apply or get in touch if you have any questions.
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