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Lead Engineer at Jumpstart
🎥 Watch a video of Matthew (one of the founders) talking through Jumpstart & the role
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We're looking for a Lead Engineer to own the technical side of Jumpstart. This isn't about adding another pair of hands - it's about adding the judgement that lets a small, fast team take on bigger, harder problems with confidence.
This has a potential path to Head of Engineering / CTO for the right person.
About Jumpstart
Recruitment sucks. Jumpstart makes it not suck.
We help startups hire exceptional non technical talent, fast. 5000+ candidates apply every month; we curate the top 1-2% and match them seamlessly with hundreds of startups through our platform.
We've driven 1500+ hires and are scaling quickly - bootstrapped all the way with a £4M forecast revenue in 2026 and continuing to double YoY. Startups love us. Candidates love us. And with AI and an enhanced product, we think we can improve this by an order of magnitude.
About the role
Our two engineers already move quickly as a pair. What the team needs next is experienced technical leadership: someone who can make the hard technical calls, know what's genuinely good enough versus a risk we need to fix, and bring real experience to the problems where trial-and-error is expensive - AI above all.
This role is for someone who is as excited by strategic ownership as they are by building. You’ll make the big technical decisions and then work alongside the team to bring them to life.
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In practice, that means you are:
- The technical decision-maker. You own the calls on architecture, integrations and reliability, and you're trusted to say what's good enough for now versus what needs fixing. On our hardest problems, especially AI, your experience saves us months of trial-and-error.
- A builder who leads. You're senior, but you're still in the code every week. You set the technical bar by holding it yourself, and you raise the level of the two engineers around you - developing them and line-managing them, not just reviewing their pull requests.
- Product-minded, with taste. You care how the platform actually feels to use. You've got a point of view on UX and design, and you help shape what we build, not just how we build it.
- A genuine partner to the leadership team. You work across the business, not in an engineering silo, and you'll constructively challenge us where you think we've got it wrong. We want the technical counterpart to our decisions, not an order-taker.
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What we're looking for
- A senior/lead/staff engineer or technical founder who's still hands-on and wants to stay that way
- Strong experience building AI/LLM-powered products in production
- A track record owning delivery on large, complex projects - and the reliability and architecture trade-offs that come with them
- Real product and design instinct, not just implementation
- Startup or scaleup experience: comfortable with ambiguity, pace and small teams
- Our tech stack: TypeScript, Next.js, and Supabase
How we work
Today, engineering is two exceptionally strong software engineers working directly with the founders and wider leadership team. We don’t have elaborate planning ceremonies, no process for process's sake. We care about shipping, making good decisions, and talking to each other.
Progression & opportunity
This is the foundational technical seat at a company entering its next phase. You'll own how we build and have a genuine say in where the business goes, with a potential path to Head of Engineering / CTO for the right person.
Worried about whether it's a fit? Apply anyway in 30 secs 👉HERE👈 - and let us do the worrying.
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