Founding Engineer

The Role

You'll join the Pharosyn team as an early hire — directly shaping the entire software stack.

We are hiring founding engineers with different strengths; you are not expected to be senior across all three domains.

AI Engineering

•⁠ ⁠Prompt engineering and LLM orchestration

•⁠ ⁠Building evaluation frameworks and feedback loops

•⁠ ⁠Deploying and operating AI systems reliably in production

Data Engineering

•⁠ ⁠Ingesting data from heterogeneous sources (APIs, RSS, web scraping)

•⁠ ⁠Data modelling, pipelines, and transformation

•⁠ ⁠PostgreSQL, vector databases, and medallion-style layering (raw → cleaned → served)

Enterprise Infrastructure

•⁠ ⁠Multi-tenant SaaS architecture

•⁠ ⁠Cloud deployment

•⁠ ⁠Security, authentication flows, and production reliability

You should demonstrate applied excellence in at least one of these areas, with demonstrated interest across multiple.

Core Engineering Philosophy

We care deeply about leverage as an engineering principle. We want you to help us build the system that builds the system:

•⁠ ⁠The development environment, tooling, and workflows that let a small team move extremely fast without breaking production

•⁠ ⁠Tight feedback loops between customer usage, observability, evaluation, and execution (tests, CI, code review)

•⁠ ⁠Early architectural choices that scale to a $100m+ product with a lean team

•⁠ ⁠Treating developer productivity, reliability, and iteration speed as first-class product concerns

You Must

•⁠ ⁠Have demonstrated ability to build and ship real products (e.g., shipped SaaS, production pipelines, open-source with users, meaningful side project, startup experience) - show us what you’ve made

•⁠ ⁠Have strong core engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn new languages quickly (our current stack includes TypeScript/React, Python, and PostgreSQL)

•⁠ ⁠Already use AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot) to materially increase output

•⁠ ⁠Thrive being given problems and architecting solutions, not waiting for project specs — you should be the best person you know at architecting brilliant solutions to customer problems

•⁠ ⁠Bonus points for experience in healthcare, biotech or regulatory data

We are primarily targeting exceptional early-career engineers and unusually strong senior engineers who want real ownership at the earliest stage

What We Offer

•⁠ ⁠£100–130k base salary as a baseline, with flexibility for candidates who bring exceptional depth in one of our core domains. For outstanding senior engineers with relevant experience building and deploying complex systems with enterprise customers, we are open to going meaningfully higher.

•⁠ ⁠Meaningful equity — this is a true founding engineer role

•⁠ ⁠Direct collaboration with the founders on product and strategy

•⁠ ⁠Travel to the US to work onsite with enterprise clients

•⁠ ⁠The chance to define the technical culture and architecture of the company from first principles

Expectations

This is an early-stage startup in a competitive market. The work is demanding and fast-moving:

•⁠ ⁠High commitment - this is not a typical 9–6 role. The pace is intense and sustained effort is expected, especially around customer delivery and critical deadlines.

•⁠ ⁠Present in the London office (in-person, not remote)

•⁠ ⁠High autonomy, high accountability

•⁠ ⁠Speed and quality - speed is essential, compromise when necessary but don’t hide behind speed as an excuse for poor quality

Values

•⁠ ⁠Operational excellence - Move fast, maintain high standards, and take responsibility for the outcome.

•⁠ ⁠Ownership - If it’s in your orbit, you own it end-to-end.

•⁠ ⁠Intellectual honesty - Say what you think, challenge ideas openly

•⁠ ⁠Practical problem-solving - Find a way forward, use the right tools, and ask for help when needed.

•⁠ ⁠Continual learning - Keep getting better, update your skills, and adapt as the problem space evolves and transfer those learnings into the product.