AI Engineer
Key Details
* Location: Bristol
* Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity
* Stage: Early-stage, venture-backed AI start-up
* Team: Working directly with founders and early engineering team
Overview
We’re building AI-powered products that solve complex real-world problems using large language models and modern machine learning systems.
As a founding engineer, you’ll help turn cutting-edge AI capabilities into scalable, reliable products used by real customers.
You’ll work across AI systems, backend infrastructure, APIs, and deployment, shaping both the product and technical direction from day one.
We’re looking for pragmatic builders who can move from prototype to production fast.
Key Responsibilities
* Build and deploy AI-powered applications using modern LLM APIs and open-source models
* Develop scalable backend systems using Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and cloud-native tooling
* Work with AI orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or similar tooling
* Build retrieval and search systems using embeddings, vector databases, and RAG pipelines
* Deploy and manage AI infrastructure using Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP, and CI/CD pipelines
* Implement evaluation, monitoring, and observability systems for production AI applications
* Optimise inference performance, latency, caching, and cost efficiency across AI workloads
* Integrate AI systems into customer workflows, internal tooling, and external APIs
* Collaborate closely with founders, product teams, and users to rapidly ship high-impact features
* Own systems end-to-end from architecture through deployment and operational support
* Strong software engineering fundamentals across backend systems, APIs, and cloud infrastructure
* Hands-on experience working with LLMs, embeddings, prompt engineering, or AI product development
* Bonus if you’ve worked in start-ups, developer platforms, data infrastructure, or applied ML environments
Next Steps
If this sounds like your kind of challenge, we’d love to hear from you.
The process is designed to move quickly and give you real exposure to the team, technical problems, and opportunity:
* Introductory conversation with the hiring managers / founders
* Collaborative Conversation around product, scaling, and engineering approach