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