Founding Engineer

This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage AI infrastructure company building a production-grade gateway that sits between applications and hundreds of large language model providers. You’ll work directly with the founders to shape the technical direction of a platform that powers reliability, observability, and cost optimisation for AI-first teams. This is a high-ownership, high-impact position for someone who thinks like a founder. What You’ll Do

• Design and build core backend services within a pragmatic microservices architecture, primarily in Go.
• Evolve and maintain the LLM gateway, including routing, failover, load balancing, and observability features.
• Make architectural decisions that balance scalability, performance, and the speed demands of an early-stage product.
• Select and work with a variety of SQL databases and distributed caches, choosing the right tool for each problem.
• Contribute to infrastructure running on Kubernetes, and help redefine the stack as the product scales.
• Collaborate closely with founders to influence product direction and technical strategy.

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with strong hands-on expertise in Go (Golang).
• Deep understanding of concurrency and practical experience with concurrent programming patterns.
• Experience designing and operating microservices architectures, including API gateways.
• Comfort working with multiple database types and distributed caching solutions, and the judgment to choose between them.
• Ability to design architectures that are both pragmatic for the current stage and scalable for the future.
• A track record of independently learning new technologies and frameworks.
• Startup or high-growth environment mindset - strong ownership, bias for action, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Right to work in the United Kingdom; visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Competitive total compensation package with significant equity. Visa sponsorship is not available.