Founding Engineer – Full-Stack / AI / Early-Stage Startup
Location: London (Hybrid 3 days onsite)
Employment Type: Permanent
Salary: Competitive (DOE)
A fast-growing early-stage technology startup is building AI-driven products that power data-heavy workflows across digital platforms. The team operates with high ownership, fast iteration cycles, and a strong engineering culture focused on shipping meaningful features into production.
They are now hiring a Founding Engineer to take end-to-end ownership of features across the full stack, contribute to AI-powered workflows, and help shape the technical architecture as the platform scales. This role suits someone who enjoys autonomy, moving quickly, and working across product, engineering, and experimentation in a startup environment.
The Role
You’ll design and implement production-grade features from initial concepts and designs through to deployment. Working across backend and frontend systems, you’ll help build intelligent workflows using modern AI tooling, contribute to cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, and experiment with emerging technologies in data engineering and machine learning.
You’ll have meaningful influence over architecture, tooling, and product direction while operating in a highly collaborative, early-stage team.
What You’ll Be Doing
Product Architecture and Delivery
* Translate project briefs and product designs into technical architecture and implementation plans.
* Own features end-to-end across backend and frontend through to production release.
* Contribute to system design decisions as the platform scales.
AI and Intelligent Workflows
* Build AI-driven features including agent-based workflows and embedding-driven matching systems.
* Experiment with LLM-powered tools and apply them to real production use cases.
* Design and optimise vector search and embedding pipelines to power semantic search, recommendation, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
* Architect and implement agentic AI systems capable of planning, reasoning, tool use, and autonomous task execution.
* Explore new approaches in automation, search, and data enrichment.
Deployment and Engineering Excellence
* Improve and maintain CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, reliable releases.
* Contribute to cloud deployments and operational stability.
* Promote engineering best practices across testing, monitoring, and code quality.
Experimentation and Innovation
* Run technical experiments in data engineering, infrastructure, and AI.
* Prototype and validate new technologies before moving them into production.
* Continuously improve developer experience and delivery velocity.
Ownership and Collaboration
* Operate across the full technical stack in a high-autonomy environment.
* Collaborate closely with product and business stakeholders.
* Take responsibility for delivery quality and system performance.
Core Experience
* 2–3 years of hands-on engineering experience or equivalent project-based experience demonstrating ownership and impact.
* Strong commercial experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
* Experience delivering production features across backend and frontend systems.
Mindset and Attributes
* Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
* Highly organised, proactive, and delivery focused.
* Strong problem-solving skills and appetite for learning.
* Excited about applying AI and LLM-powered tools to real-world workflows.
* Thrives with autonomy and responsibility.
Bonus Experience
* Exposure to AWS serverless or event-driven architectures.
* Mobile development experience (e.g., Flutter).
Benefits
* Flexible hybrid working model
* Generous Equity
* High ownership and autonomy
* Opportunity to influence architecture and product direction
* Fast learning environment with exposure to AI and modern cloud tooling
* Competitive compensation and early-stage growth opportunity
Interview Process
* Short introductory call
* In-person technical challenge and interview
* Culture and values interview