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.