Founding AI Engineer

LEC AI | Knightsbridge, London | Full-Time | Office-based

About LEC AI

LEC AI is the AI business inside LEC Industries, a London-headquartered group building technology and operating companies across robotics, AI, and consumer brands -- with seven decades of operating depth between the UK and China.

We are not a research lab. We are not a corporate IT function. We are a tech business building tech, with live commercial deployments and real users from day one.

The Role

We are hiring our Founding AI Engineer to help build Donnie -- the AI infrastructure layer for modern organisations. Persistent memory, multi-agent orchestration, real-time data ingestion, and a tool surface that gives companies' AI direct hands on the systems that actually run them.

Donnie is in production today across three operating businesses. It is on a roadmap to multi-tenant productisation for 10-100 person companies. The first hire after the architect shapes the next decade of this platform.

This is the most senior individual contributor seat in the company.

What you will own

• Core architecture decisions on memory, retrieval, and agent orchestration
• Production reliability of the entire AI stack
• Model selection, fine-tuning, and evaluation
• Tool reasoning, latency budgets, and cost controls
• The path from internal platform to multi-tenant SaaS
• Direct hiring authority on a small engineering team in year one

Who you are

You have shipped agentic AI systems into production -- with real users, real data, real failure modes. Not a demo. Not a hackathon. Production.

You have at least one of:

• Built or materially contributed to an LLM memory system handling real workloads
• Fine-tuned open-weight models on proprietary data and shipped the result
• Built a real multi-agent system with genuine orchestration logic, not a chain of LLM calls
• Designed and deployed retrieval pipelines at scale

Memory system skilled

You write code every day. Python is your first language. You are fluent in Postgres, Docker, and the full stack of getting things live.

You can read a paper in the morning and ship a prototype by evening. You have strong opinions on evaluation that go beyond vibes. You reach for maintainable over clever.

You operate without a quarterly roadmap. You ship in days, not sprints. You take the brief and run.

Bonus signals

• Open-source work other engineers actually use
• MCP, tool-calling, or audio/vision pipelines shipped at production quality
• Mandarin (we operate across UK and China)
• Founder ambitions -- you want to learn how a Group CEO actually thinks, with full access to one

Why this is different

• Founding seat. You inherit a working stack and shape the next phase. Plenty built, plenty to invent
• Direct CEO access. The Group CEO uses what you build every day, in real conversations about real deals. Feedback in hours, not quarters
• Peer, not a boss. The Principal AI Architect is looking for someone to push him, not someone to babysit
• Genuinely novel IP. Investor and university-grade research, not productivity tooling
• No gatekeepers. You can deploy to production on day two. Compute and tools are bought when needed, not budgeted

How to apply

Apply on LinkedIn and send your portfolio to talent@lecai.ai with the subject line Founding AI Engineer.

Show us what you have built. GitHub, deployed projects, open source, technical writing, production systems. Anything that proves real shipped work.

CV welcome alongside. We read the portfolio first.