Founding Engineer

Our client is a profitable, founder-led business with a decade of operating history and long-term enterprise relationships in a high-growth marketing vertical. They are now entering their next phase: expanding a technology platform built on proprietary data, deep category expertise, and an existing commercial foundation. The platform is AI-native, subscription-based, and serves organisations investing significantly in this space.

This is a zero-to-one moment for a business that already has the customers, credibility, and revenue to back it up.

The Role

The team builds software differently. AI-native tooling is used to go from requirement to working product in days, not months. This isn't about prompting your way to a prototype, it means owning the full lifecycle: understanding what a customer actually needs, shaping the right solution, and shipping it yourself.

As a Founding Engineer, you sit at the intersection of product thinking, technical depth, and delivery ownership, a combination that used to require three separate hires.

This role didn't exist two years ago. AI tooling has fundamentally changed what a single person can own end-to-end, and the product team is built entirely around that shift.

What You'll Do

• Own discovery to delivery: Join customer and stakeholder calls, extract the real requirement underneath the stated one, then go build it. No handoff. No ticket queue.
• Build with AI-native tools: Use the best available tooling to ship working software fast. Know when to generate, when to edit, and when to reason from first principles.
• Make product decisions under uncertainty: Scope features sensibly, make the right tradeoffs between speed and correctness, and know when something is good enough to ship.
• Test and hold quality: Think adversarially about your own work, cover edge cases, write the test, catch the bug before the user does.

What They're Looking For

Your primary instinct should be product: you think in users, workflows, and outcomes first. But you need enough technical depth to know what's hard, what's easy, what's a shortcut that will cost you later and how to actually build it.

No requirement to be a senior engineer; what matters is that you've built things, understand how the layers of a system fit together, and aren't intimidated by code you didn't write. Curiosity matters more than credentials.

Technical familiarity expected across:

• Frontend vs backend tradeoffs
• REST APIs and data models
• Databases and data modelling basics
• Caching strategies
• Deployment environments (staging, production, CI/CD)
• UI component libraries
• Authentication flows
• Performance fundamentals

Nice to have:

• Experience shipping in a startup or early-stage environment
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Side projects you actually finished
• Opinions about what makes software feel good to use

The Details

• Compensation: Market-competitive salary + annual bonus scheme
• Location: London-based office; team is mostly remote with regular in-person days
• Work authorisation: Must have existing right to work in the UK or EU; visa sponsorship not available
• Team: Small team of builders shipping end-to-end