Founding Engineer

Founding ML Engineer / Founding Head of Engineering - London- £120,000

Seniority: First senior technical hire

Focus: Reasoning engine design, data strategy, early engineering team building

Role Overview

You will serve as the company's founding technical leader, architecting a reasoning and simulation engine that models how buildings are constructed. The role blends applied machine learning, data architecture, knowledge-graph design, and organizational leadership. You will help define the technical roadmap through seed stage and lay the foundation for a future Series A engineering organization.

This position requires comfort with ambiguity, strong product intuition, and the ability to translate real-world construction workflows into computational systems. You'll work directly with field teams to ensure models reflect practical construction realities.

Key Responsibilities

Technical

• Build end-to-end data pipelines for, cost catalogues, and historical project information.
• Select, train, and fine-tune models for sequencing and dependency prediction
• Develop multimodal embeddings that unify text, geometry, schedules, and metadata.
• Implement continuous-learning loops using simulation outputs and field feedback.
• Lead research on construction knowledge representation, ontology design, and explainable reasoning.
• Collaborate with platform and simulation engineers to integrate models into wider platform
• Design multi-agent reasoning systems powered by a shared knowledge graph.

Leadership

• Operate as the founding technical leader prior to CTO hire; then report to the CTO.
• Define hiring needs and recruit the initial engineering team.
• Establish early engineering processes (sprints, documentation, compliance, road mapping).
• Convert customer and field insights into product and model requirements.
• Represent the technical vision with early partners and construction stakeholders.
• Contribute to a culture centred on collaboration with manual workers

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience deploying ML systems in production (start-up or fast-iteration environment strongly preferred).
• Experience leading teams or cross-functional AI/ML initiatives with PM-style responsibilities.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks
• Strong background in data architecture and knowledge graphs.
• Strong education from top university

Bonus:

• familiarity with 3D Vison model / construction data or something similar
• Track record of combining research with solid engineering practices.
• Graduate training in AI, robotics, or computational design is a plus.
• digital-twin work highly beneficial