Founding Technical hire / Full stack AI engineer

We are looking for a founding technical hire to take real ownership of the product, architecture, infrastructure, and AI systems that sit behind iMaintain. This is not a narrow software engineering role. You will be helping build the core platform, protect live client data, improve AI answer quality, and make technical decisions that shape the company as it scales.

The right person will be comfortable moving across backend engineering, mobile product, AWS infrastructure, RAG systems, data ingestion, and technical strategy. You do not need to be perfect in every area on day one, but you must be able to learn quickly, make sound decisions, and take responsibility for production systems.

About iMaintain

iMaintain is building AI-powered software for the maintenance and asset management industry. Our platform helps manufacturers unlock knowledge hidden inside CMMS systems, manuals, work orders, engineering documents, asset records, and operational data.

We integrate with existing systems so maintenance teams can troubleshoot faster, reduce downtime, improve reliability, and capture engineering knowledge more effectively. The product has real industrial use cases, live customer data, and a clear opportunity to become a critical system for engineering teams.

The Role

As our founding technical hire, your job is to help turn iMaintain from an early product into a robust, scalable, commercially reliable platform.

You will work directly with the founders to build features, improve architecture, manage infrastructure, harden multi-tenant systems, support customer onboarding, and improve the accuracy and reliability of our AI and RAG workflows.

This role suits someone who wants ownership, pace, and responsibility. You will not just receive tickets. You will be expected to understand the customer problem, challenge assumptions, design sensible solutions, and ship work that supports the growth of the business.

Responsibilities

· Own and develop backend services using Python, FastAPI, Postgres, and related technologies.

· Help design and maintain multi-tenant systems where data isolation, permissions, and query correctness are critical.

· Build and improve React Native mobile experiences for engineers and maintenance teams in the field.

· Manage and improve AWS infrastructure, including Aurora, Cognito, App Runner, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and security practices.

· Develop and improve RAG workflows, evaluation datasets, retrieval quality, prompt behaviour, and answer accuracy.

· Support data ingestion from CMMS, EAM, document stores, spreadsheets, and messy client export formats.

· Build connectors, APIs, ingestion pipelines, and internal tools that make customer onboarding faster and more reliable.

· Improve observability, logging, testing, and release processes so issues are found before they affect customers.

· Help govern LLM usage, cost, latency, reliability, and safety as the product scales.

· Work closely with the founders on product decisions, technical strategy, customer implementation, and long-term architecture.

Do you have experience in Python?, Do you have a Master's degree?, We are looking for someone with:

· Strong Python backend experience, ideally with FastAPI or similar API frameworks.

· Good knowledge of relational databases, especially Postgres, schema design, data modelling, and tenant-aware architecture.

· Experience building production software where reliability, security, and data quality matter.

· Working knowledge of AWS, DevOps, CI/CD, deployments, authentication, environments, and monitoring.

· Experience or strong interest in AI engineering, RAG, embeddings, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, or LLM application development.

· Ability to work across the stack, including mobile or frontend product work, ideally React Native.

· Strong problem-solving ability and the judgement to balance speed, quality, cost, and technical debt.

· A proactive, self-starting attitude and comfort working without heavy process or constant direction.

· A genuine interest in building a company, not just writing code.

Nice to Have

· Experience with CMMS, EAM, manufacturing, maintenance, reliability, or industrial software.

· Event-driven ingestion, queue-based processing, document parsing, search, vector databases, or data pipelines.

· Experience with Aurora, Cognito, App Runner, Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, or similar tools.

· Experience designing APIs, connectors, integrations, or customer-facing implementation workflows.

· Startup experience, founding engineer experience, or experience owning large parts of a product with limited resources.

Who This Role Is For

This role is for someone who wants to be early, take ownership, and build the technical foundations of an ambitious AI startup.

You might be a strong full stack engineer ready for more responsibility, a backend engineer who wants to move closer to product and AI, or a startup-minded technologist who enjoys solving complex systems problems with commercial urgency.

If you want a highly defined corporate engineering role with layers of management, this is probably not the right fit. If you want to help build the product, infrastructure, and technical direction of a company from the ground up, this could be the opportunity.

Pulled from the full job description

• Flexitime
• Free parking
• Company pension
• Casual dress
• On-site parking, · Salary of £45,000 - £48,000 per year, depending on experience.

· Share options available for the right person.

· Full-time/hybrid role based in Gloucester, with remote days available.

· A founding-level technical role with direct influence and ownership over product, architecture, infrastructure, and AI systems.

· Exposure to real industrial customers, live operational data, and meaningful engineering problems.

· The opportunity to help build a company from the ground up.

Pay: £45,000.00-£48,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Casual dress
• Company pension
• Flexitime
• Free parking
• On-site parking

Application question(s):

• Answer yes or no to each of these skills (or you will be rejected)

Backend Python / FastAPI / Postgres: Mobile React Native: AWS / DevOps: Data / CMMS ingestion: Architecture / Technology Strategy: RAG system design: Multi-tenant DB: Event-driven ingestion: LLM cost governance: API / connector design: Observability

iMaintain is an early-stage AI software startup building technology for the maintenance, engineering, manufacturing, and asset management sectors.