Founding Engineer

Understanding Recruitment
Greater London, UK
about 1 month ago

Role details

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

Tech stack

Artificial Intelligence Cursor (Graphical User Interface Elements) Programming Tools Github Interaction Design Software Product Management TypeScript ReactJS Large Language Models Backend Front End Software Development

Job description

Do you have experience building and shipping exceptional UX at an early-stage startup or customer-facing product?

Are you excited by real ownership, product influence, and shaping the frontend experience of a genuinely category-defining AI product?

🚀 Founding Engineer (Frontend) - AI-native Workspace 🚀

💵 Salary: Up to £160k + equity

📍 Location: London, onsite

🧠Experience: 5-10 years (startup or customer-facing product background are a bonus)

I’m excited to be continuing our partnership 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).

As the company evolves into a more product-led, consumer-style experience, they’re now looking to hire their first dedicated Frontend Engineer, someone who can own and shape the entire user experience from the ground up.

This is a true founding-level opportunity as the 3rd engineering hire.

💡 You’ll work directly on:

  • Building high-performance, real-time AI-native interfaces
  • Crafting intuitive UX for complex autonomous workflows
  • Developing beautiful, responsive frontend systems in TypeScript & React
  • Creating product experiences users genuinely love using
  • Influencing product direction, interaction design, and frontend architecture

✠They’re particularly interested in engineers who have:

  • Worked on developer tools, web-based IDEs, or highly interactive products (e.g. Gitpod, GitHub, Cursor-style environments)
  • Built customer-facing or prosumer applications
  • Strong product intuition and a sharp eye for UX/UI
  • Experience operating in fast-moving startup environments
  • A desire to own frontend strategy, not just implement tickets

💻 Tech stack:

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • AI-native workflows & tooling throughout engineering

🎯 Bonus points for:

  • Some backend experience for optionality
  • Experience with PLG or consumer-style products
  • Design sensibility and ability to bridge engineering + product experience

🔎 What they’re looking for:

  • Strong commercial & product mindset - you care deeply about user experience and outcomes
  • Comfortable in ambiguity and zero-to-one environments
  • Proven ability to ship quickly and iterate with users
  • High ownership mentality and startup pace
  • AI-native way of working (LLMs are tools, not toys)

🚀 Why join now?

  • Real founding-level ownership and influence
  • Small, elite team that ships fast
  • Well-funded with long runway
  • Opportunity to define the frontend experience of a next-generation AI product
  • Not another boring B2B SaaS platform… this is something people will genuinely want to use

If you’re excited by the idea of building beautiful, intelligent product experiences at the frontier of AI, this is the one. Interested? Apply now 🚀

Requirements

Do you have experience building and shipping exceptional UX at an early-stage startup or customer-facing product?

Are you excited by real ownership, product influence, and shaping the frontend experience of a genuinely category-defining AI product?

🚀 Founding Engineer (Frontend) - AI-native Workspace 🚀

💵 Salary: Up to £160k + equity

📍 Location: London, onsite

🧠Experience: 5-10 years (startup or customer-facing product background are a bonus)

I’m excited to be continuing our partnership 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).

As the company evolves into a more product-led, consumer-style experience, they’re now looking to hire their first dedicated Frontend Engineer, someone who can own and shape the entire user experience from the ground up.

This is a true founding-level opportunity as the 3rd engineering hire.

💡 You’ll work directly on:

  • Building high-performance, real-time AI-native interfaces
  • Crafting intuitive UX for complex autonomous workflows
  • Developing beautiful, responsive frontend systems in TypeScript & React
  • Creating product experiences users genuinely love using
  • Influencing product direction, interaction design, and frontend architecture

✠They’re particularly interested in engineers who have:

  • Worked on developer tools, web-based IDEs, or highly interactive products (e.g. Gitpod, GitHub, Cursor-style environments)
  • Built customer-facing or prosumer applications
  • Strong product intuition and a sharp eye for UX/UI
  • Experience operating in fast-moving startup environments
  • A desire to own frontend strategy, not just implement tickets

💻 Tech stack:

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • AI-native workflows & tooling throughout engineering

🎯 Bonus points for:

  • Some backend experience for optionality
  • Experience with PLG or consumer-style products
  • Design sensibility and ability to bridge engineering + product experience

🔎 What they’re looking for:

  • Strong commercial & product mindset - you care deeply about user experience and outcomes
  • Comfortable in ambiguity and zero-to-one environments
  • Proven ability to ship quickly and iterate with users
  • High ownership mentality and startup pace
  • AI-native way of working (LLMs are tools, not toys)

🚀 Why join now?

  • Real founding-level ownership and influence
  • Small, elite team that ships fast
  • Well-funded with long runway
  • Opportunity to define the frontend experience of a next-generation AI product
  • Not another boring B2B SaaS platform… this is something people will genuinely want to use

Apply for this position

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

Apply on www.understandingrecruitment.com

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

6:36 min

Funding open source through GitHub Accelerator and Sponsors

Stormy Peters · WWC 2023

1:21 min

Exploring the target application for front end tests

Anna Mcdougall · JS Congress

1:52 min

Structuring and scaling the backend engineering team

Stefan Lingler Stefan Lingler +1 · Coffee With Developers

1:20 min

Founding an AI product within a large enterprise

Neel Sundaresan Neel Sundaresan +1 · WWC Europe 2026

2:40 min

Using GitHub primitives for internal documentation and corporate operations

Kyle Daigle · Coffee With Developers

2:14 min

Exploring internal AI product initiatives and global engineering roles

Maria Apazoglou · Coffee With Developers

Videos

See all

Related articles

See all