Founding AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer

London - On-site

Up to £150k + equity

I'm partnering with a well-funded early-stage startup looking to hire a Founding AI Engineer who can take them on to Series A.

This is an opportunity to join a small, high-calibre engineering team that's building production-grade AI systems used by real customers today.

Revenue generating and with three years of runway, this is a solid opportunity for anyone who enjoys building systems that actually ship, rather than just prototyping models, this will be a strong fit.

You'll work at the intersection of LLMs, agentic systems and applied AI, taking ownership of projects end-to-end, from experimentation to deployment. If you

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, and ship production-grade LLM applications (prompting, RAG, evaluation, deployment).
• Develop and refine AI pipelines and retrieval systems using tools like LangChain, LangGraph, or custom frameworks.
• Own model evaluation frameworks to ensure quality, factuality, and performance across real-world workloads.
• Collaborate closely with the founding engineering team to build scalable infrastructure for AI-driven applications.
• Mentor mid-level engineers and help establish best practices around applied AI development and deployment.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2-3+ years in AI/ML applications.
• Proven track record of shipping AI products into production (not just research or prototypes).
• Preferred tech stack - TypeScript, React, LangChain, and LLM orchestration.
• Experience with RAG systems, vector databases (e.g. Pinecone, PGVector, Weaviate), and model evaluation.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment with a high degree of autonomy.
• Exposure to agentic systems, prompt optimisation, or multi-agent frameworks.

Why This Role?

• Join a high-impact, early engineering team working on complex applied AI challenges.
• Shape the direction of real-world LLM applications with full ownership and creative freedom.
• Competitive salary £100k-£150k + equity.

Reach out to Jamie Forgan for more information.