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