Founding Engineer

Understanding Recruitment
London, UK
13 days ago

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience level
Experienced
Experience required
3 years minimum
Compensation
£120,000.0 - £160,000.0
Working hours
Regular working hours

Tech stack

Artificial Intelligence Cursor (Graphical User Interface Elements) Software Architecture Systems Development Life Cycle TypeScript ReactJS Large Language Models Front End Software Development

Job description

Do you have experience working at an early-stage startup and want to do it again, properly this time?

Are you excited by real ownership, commercial impact, and building something genuinely category-defining?

🚀 Founding Engineer (Product-Led ‘Generalist’) - AI-native Workspace 🚀

💰 Salary: £120k - £160k + equity

📍 Location: London, Onsite

🧠Experience: 3-8 years (startup / founding engineer background preferred)

We’re partnered with a pre-seed AI startup building agentic AI systems that radically improve how knowledge workers think, decide, and get work done. This is not another chatbot. This is an AI-native product being built from first principles by engineers from elite technical environments (e.g. Palantir, Citadel).

They’re now looking for a Founding Engineer, someone who’s:

  • Already been a founding / early engineer or
  • Worked in a fast-moving, high-growth startup and understands what it takes to ship real product, fast, with users in mind
  • Has a generalist mindset
  • A strong mathematical background

You’ll work directly on:

  • Core agent loops (prompting, tool selection, model choice, memory & context)
  • High-performance, real-time LLM-powered UX
  • Making autonomous systems reliable enough for daily, mission-critical work

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll wear many hats:

  • Backend: Python
  • Frontend: TypeScript, React
  • AI/LLMs everywhere (Cursor/Copilot as a daily workflow)
  • Architectural decisions & trade-offs
  • Product thinking & UX judgment
  • Talking to users and rapidly iterating
  • Full SDLC ownership; build, ship, break, fix, repeat

What they’re looking for:

  • Strong commercial & product mindset - you care about outcomes, not just code
  • Comfortable in ambiguity and zero-to-one environments
  • Proven ability to ship fast in small teams
  • AI-native way of working (LLMs are tools, not toys)
  • Resilient, adaptable, and genuinely excited by hard problems

Why join now?

  • Real ownership - technical and product
  • Small, elite team that ships fast
  • Well-funded with long runway
  • You’ll help define a product shaping the next generation of software
  • Not another boring B2B Saas… this is something you’d actually use

If you’re ready to step into a true founding-level role, influence the product direction, and build something genuinely new, this is the one. Interested? Apply now! 🚀

Requirements

Do you have experience working at an early-stage startup and want to do it again, properly this time?

Are you excited by real ownership, commercial impact, and building something genuinely category-defining?, 🧠Experience: 3-8 years (startup / founding engineer background preferred), * Worked in a fast-moving, high-growth startup and understands what it takes to ship real product, fast, with users in mind

  • Has a generalist mindset
  • A strong mathematical background

You’ll work directly on:

  • Core agent loops (prompting, tool selection, model choice, memory & context)
  • High-performance, real-time LLM-powered UX
  • Making autonomous systems reliable enough for daily, mission-critical work

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll wear many hats:

  • Backend: Python
  • Frontend: TypeScript, React
  • AI/LLMs everywhere (Cursor/Copilot as a daily workflow)
  • Architectural decisions & trade-offs
  • Product thinking & UX judgment
  • Talking to users and rapidly iterating
  • Full SDLC ownership; build, ship, break, fix, repeat

What they’re looking for:

  • Strong commercial & product mindset - you care about outcomes, not just code
  • Comfortable in ambiguity and zero-to-one environments
  • Proven ability to ship fast in small teams
  • AI-native way of working (LLMs are tools, not toys)
  • Resilient, adaptable, and genuinely excited by hard problems

Benefits & conditions

  • Real ownership - technical and product
  • Small, elite team that ships fast
  • Well-funded with long runway
  • You’ll help define a product shaping the next generation of software
  • Not another boring B2B Saas… this is something you’d actually use

If you’re ready to step into a true founding-level role, influence the product direction, and build something genuinely new, this is the one. Interested? Apply now! 🚀

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on www.understandingrecruitment.com

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