Founding Engineer
LB340
Posted: 17/02/2026
- £120,000 - £160,000
- London Area
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) – 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 either:
- 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
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 borning 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! 🚀
Kirsty Myers
Java & Kotlin Recruitment Consultant