Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a seed-stage AI infrastructure startup building a production-grade LLM gateway that sits at the core of AI-first products. You will work directly with the founders to shape the technical direction and architecture of the platform, making a tangible impact from day one. If you want to leave a real mark on a fast-growing company, or are building toward founding your own startup someday, this role is a rare opportunity to do meaningful work at the ground floor.

What You'll Do

• Design and build backend services that power an LLM routing and observability platform serving production AI workloads.
• Own architectural decisions across a pragmatic microservices stack, balancing scalability with the practical needs of an early-stage product.
• Contribute to the core gateway service written in Go, as well as auxiliary and ML/AI services in Python.
• Select and apply the right database and caching technologies for each problem, across SQL databases and distributed caches.
• Work within and evolve a Kubernetes-based infrastructure, redefining the stack as the product grows.
• Collaborate closely with the founding team to translate product goals into robust, efficient engineering solutions.

What We're Looking For

• 5 or more years of experience building backend services in a compiled language, with strong preference for Go.
• Solid, practical understanding of concurrency and demonstrated experience applying it in production systems.
• Hands-on experience selecting and using different database and caching technologies appropriately.
• Ability to design architectures that are both scalable and pragmatic, calibrated to where a product actually is.
• Strong judgment around tradeoffs between quality, speed, and completeness when building minimal but correct products.
• A track record of independently picking up new technologies and running with them.
• Experience with Kubernetes is a strong plus.
• Background in AI or LLM infrastructure, or developer tooling, is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

On-site in London, England, United Kingdom.