Building in stealth
Lead Software Engineer
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Founding Lead Engineer
About us
We’re building business-critical software for an industry most people never think about until it touches them, or someone close to them. It’s an industry that the UK and many other developed economies require to function. We support professionals that step into situations that have often gone wrong, and right now they’re doing it on software that’s slow and dated.
We are an AI-native startup with a focus on engineering and product. To us, being AI-native doesn’t just mean using AI. It’s a fundamental shift in how technology companies operate and deliver. To join our team, you must have a deep interest in AI and have demonstrated that you can apply it effectively in a current or recent role.
We’ve got a proven prototype and we’re scaling the team to take it to market. We’re well capitalised, backed by an industry partner, and led by a founder with domain experience. We will remain building in stealth until our launch in 2027.
Your role
This is the first external engineering hire into the company. It’s a hands-on technical role, not just a management one. You will initially lead one junior engineer, with the team expected to grow as the company scales. Your day-to-day responsibilities will include:
- Own day-to-day engineering delivery and detailed solution design within the agreed architecture, and ship the production product
- Build and operate the production platform on AWS, with infrastructure defined and deployed using Terraform
- Build the agent layer: orchestration, tool use, human-in-the-loop approvals, and an eval harness that tells you whether a change helped or hurt
- Set the engineering bar (code quality, pull requests, testing, CI/CD, observability and maintainability), and make the detailed technical calls needed to keep delivery moving
- Implement security and compliance controls (RBAC, audit logging, data residency and eventual ISO27001 readiness), escalating material security or regulatory risks
- Build migration pipelines away from the incumbent
- Own routine releases, production diagnostics, initial incident response, dependencies and technical debt visibility
- Lead and mentor the engineering team and help hire the engineers who come after you
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What we’re looking for
You don’t need every line below, but you should recognise yourself in most of it.
- Senior level experience building and shipping production B2B SaaS software
- Experience being a tech lead, or the de facto one on your team, including mentoring junior engineers and coordinating day-to-day delivery
- Strong with Python and a modern React front-end
- Solid relational database understanding (PostgreSQL or MySQL)
- Hands-on experience building with LLMs, and a genuine interest in where the field is going
- Comfortable working with agent harnesses; including evals, tracing and observability. Strong plus if you have direct experience with agent orchestration and eval tooling
- Strong hands-on AWS and Terraform experience, including automated deployment, environment management and secure, cost-aware operation
- Familiar with AWS managed and serverless services: Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53, S3, Aurora/RDS, DynamoDB, EventBridge, Step Functions, SQS/SNS, IAM/Cognito, KMS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, VPC networking and WAF
- Experience implementing CI/CD, automated testing, production observability and live-service diagnostics
- Comfortable with ambiguity and ownership, and ready to take the lead on development
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Who thrives here
- Think outside of the box: you'll wear many hats, learn fast, and reason your way through a constantly shifting technological environment.
- Initiative & drive: it comes with the territory in a startup. There are no layers of approval to hide behind, and you should feel responsible for the outcome.
- Team spirit: one person does not disrupt an industry alone. You must be able to work together in a team focused on the common goal of achieving product market fit and scaling.
What you get
- £75,000 - £85,000 per annum depending on candidate
- Meaningful equity options.
- Real ownership and responsibility for our engineering efforts.
- Autonomy arising from a flat structure without bureaucracy.
- The real potential to scale your role as the company grows.
- An opportunity to work with the latest technology with modern tooling.
- A difficult and rewarding problem to solve.
- Working on a fast-paced team.
Location
This is an in-person role based in Norwich. We're co-located in the offices of our industry partner, so our target users are a desk away and on hand to consult throughout the build.
For the right person, we’re open to discussing the arrangement.
How to apply
Please apply with anything that helps us understand what you’ve built before – GitHub, a cover letter, and links to shipped work.
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