Founding Engineer

Argus AI is an intelligence startup. We help governments, campaigns, institutions, and high-profile individuals understand what millions of people are thinking, feeling, and mobilising around in real time — before it shows up in polls, headlines, or unrest.

Our platform combines:

• Large-scale social media data ingestion
• Advanced sentiment and narrative analysis
• Early warnings for a variety of crisis scenarios
• Synthetic focus groups and demographic-level insight

This is not a dashboard business. We are building decision-grade intelligence for high-stakes environments.

The Role: We're looking for a Founding Engineer to help build the first real version of Argus AI.

You will be the first technical hire, working directly with the founder to:

• Build the MVP from the ground up
• Make key architectural decisions
• Ship fast, iterate faster, and get real users in the loop

This is a hands-on role. You will be writing production code from week one.

What You'll Be Building:

• Data ingestion pipelines
• Social media APIs (X/Twitter first)
• Scraping where APIs fall short
• Backend systems
• Data storage, processing, and retrieval
• Scalable services for analysis and querying
• AI & analysis layer
• Sentiment analysis beyond simple polarity
• Narrative clustering and topic evolution
• Early indicators of mobilisation or risk
• Core product
• Internal dashboards and client-facing outputs
• Tools for synthetic focus groups and segmentation
• Infrastructure
• Cloud deployment, monitoring, reliability
• Pragmatic security decisions (this is intelligence-adjacent work)

What We're Looking For:

MUST-HAVES:

• Strong full-stack engineering background
• Very comfortable with Python
• Experience working with:
• APIs (especially social platforms)
• Data pipelines and ETL workflows
• Hands-on experience with:
• Web scraping (e.g. BeautifulSoup, Selenium)
• Databases (SQL and/or NoSQL)
• Comfortable deploying and maintaining systems in production

NICE-TO-HAVES:

Experience with:

• NLP / sentiment analysis
• LLMs or ML pipelines

Familiarity with:

• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar)
• Basic data visualisation / dashboards
• Prior startup or early-stage experience

How You Work:

• You like ownership, not tickets
• You're comfortable with ambiguity and moving targets
• You optimise for shipping, not theoretical perfection
• You enjoy working closely with a non-technical founder
• You care about building something important, not just elegant
• You are able and willing to work in-person, at least two or three days a week

What This Is NOT:

• Not a CTO role (at least not yet)
• Not a large team with layers of management
• Not a place to coast or over-abstract
• Not a "research-only" ML role

There is a clear path to senior technical leadership as the company grows.

Compensation:

• £70k–£90k base salary (depending on experience)
• Meaningful equity with standard vesting