Founding ML Engineer / Founding Head of Engineering - London- £120,000
Seniority: First senior technical hire
Focus: Reasoning engine design, data strategy, early engineering team building
Role Overview
You will serve as the company’s founding technical leader, architecting a reasoning and simulation engine that models how buildings are constructed. The role blends applied machine learning, data architecture, knowledge-graph design, and organizational leadership. You will help define the technical roadmap through seed stage and lay the foundation for a future Series A engineering organization.
This position requires comfort with ambiguity, strong product intuition, and the ability to translate real-world construction workflows into computational systems. You’ll work directly with field teams to ensure models reflect practical construction realities.
Key Responsibilities
Technical
* Build end-to-end data pipelines for, cost catalogues, and historical project information.
* Select, train, and fine-tune models for sequencing and dependency prediction
* Develop multimodal embeddings that unify text, geometry, schedules, and metadata.
* Implement continuous-learning loops using simulation outputs and field feedback.
* Lead research on construction knowledge representation, ontology design, and explainable reasoning.
* Collaborate with platform and simulation engineers to integrate models into wider platform
* Design multi-agent reasoning systems powered by a shared knowledge graph.
Leadership
* Operate as the founding technical leader prior to CTO hire; then report to the CTO.
* Define hiring needs and recruit the initial engineering team.
* Establish early engineering processes (sprints, documentation, compliance, road mapping).
* Convert customer and field insights into product and model requirements.
* Represent the technical vision with early partners and construction stakeholders.
* Contribute to a culture centred on collaboration with manual workers
Requirements
* 8+ years of experience deploying ML systems in production (start-up or fast-iteration environment strongly preferred).
* Experience leading teams or cross-functional AI/ML initiatives with PM-style responsibilities.
* Advanced proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks
* Strong background in data architecture and knowledge graphs.
* Strong education from top university
Bonus:
* familiarity with 3D Vison model / construction data or something similar
* Track record of combining research with solid engineering practices.
* Graduate training in AI, robotics, or computational design is a plus.
* digital-twin work highly beneficial