Founding Engineer

About the Role

Join a small, high-impact team building a novel infrastructure product that serves as the backbone for next-generation AI applications — powering coding assistants, agent orchestration systems, and AI-first platforms at scale. You'll work directly with the founders to shape the technical direction of the company and leave a tangible mark on the product from day one.

This is an ideal role for an engineer who thrives in fast-moving environments, has a founder's mindset, or wants to accelerate their growth before launching their own startup someday.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain high-performance backend services that form the core of an AI gateway platform serving production workloads

• Own and evolve a pragmatic microservices architecture running on Kubernetes, with a core gateway written in Go and auxiliary/ML services in Python

• Make critical architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, and cost — balancing speed of delivery with production-grade quality

• Work across SQL databases and distributed caches, choosing the right tool for each problem

• Collaborate directly with founders to influence product strategy and engineering culture

• Help grow the engineering team and set the bar for technical standards as the company scales

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with strong hands-on proficiency in Go (Golang)

• Deep understanding of concurrency and proven experience applying concurrent programming patterns in production

• Experience designing and working with microservices architectures, including API gateways

• Solid knowledge of various SQL databases and distributed caching solutions; ability to select and configure them appropriately

• Ability to design architectures that are both scalable and pragmatic — calibrated to the product's current stage and real needs

• Strong opinions on engineering trade-offs between quality, speed, and completeness; you know that "minimal" is not "broken"

• A track record of independently learning new technologies and applying them effectively

• Right to work in the United Kingdom — visa sponsorship is not available

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with LLM infrastructure, AI routing platforms, or developer tooling for AI-first applications

• Experience with Kubernetes in production environments

• Background at high-growth startups or infrastructure-focused companies (e.g. API platforms, cloud infrastructure, observability tooling)

Tech Stack

• Core gateway: Go (Golang)

• Auxiliary / ML services: Python

• Orchestration: Kubernetes

• Data: SQL databases + distributed caches

Expect this stack to evolve — and expect to be the one helping redefine it.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive total compensation package

• Significant equity stake — meaningful ownership in an early-stage company

Location

• London, United Kingdom — on-site

• Visa sponsorship is not available; candidates must have the right to work in the UK