Founding AI Engineer

Founding Engineer | London | Up To £140,000 + Equity

We’re working with a well-backed early-stage AI company building enterprise-grade generative AI systems for complex, high-value workflows. The team is small, technical, and moving fast - they’re now looking for a Founding AI Engineer to help shape both the product and engineering culture from the ground up.

This is not a “maintain legacy systems” type role. You’ll be joining at the stage where architecture decisions still matter, product direction changes weekly, and exceptional engineers can have outsized impact.

The focus of the role is GenAI systems engineering - designing, evaluating, and deploying LLM-powered products that operate reliably in production environments.

What you’ll be doing

• Building and improving LLM orchestration pipelines
• Designing prompt systems, evaluation frameworks, and feedback loops
• Working across retrieval, context management, agent workflows, and inference optimisation
• Deploying AI products into production with a strong focus on reliability and observability
• Collaborating closely with founders, product, and end users to rapidly iterate on features
• Helping establish engineering best practices, tooling, and technical direction early on

What they’re looking for

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and modern AI tooling
• Experience shipping real products, not just prototypes
• Someone comfortable owning problems end-to-end rather than waiting for detailed specs
• Engineers already using AI-native development workflows.
• Ability to move quickly without sacrificing engineering quality

Experience across AI engineering, backend systems, data infrastructure, or scalable SaaS platforms is all relevant.

The environment

This suits someone who genuinely enjoys early-stage engineering. The pace is high, expectations are high, and there’s a strong bias toward ownership and execution. In return, you’ll get real influence over product, architecture, and technical culture from day one.

Package

• Up to £140k
• Meaningful equity
• Founding-level ownership and autonomy
• London-based, in-office collaboration

If you’re interested in building production-grade GenAI systems in a genuinely high-calibre start-up environment, happy to discuss further.