Founding Engineer.

Founding Engineer

Location: London (2 days per week in Canary Wharf, hybrid)
Compensation: £70k-£80k ~1-2% equity

A fast-growing social community platform with over 125,000 organically acquired users is seeking its first in-house Founding Engineer.

The company connects people through shared interests-sports, book clubs, and meetups-helping members build friendships both online and offline.

With a clear roadmap to scale to one million users and beyond, the business is now ready to bring technical leadership in-house.

The Founding Engineer will work closely with the founder and product lead to own technical execution, while also laying the foundations for future team growth.

This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the product and technical direction of a social platform that has already achieved impressive traction without paid acquisition.

Skills/Experience

• Experience as a founding Engineer
• Write production-quality code across the stack, including Node.js, Express, GraphQL, TypeScript, React, and React Native.
• Deliver high-quality, responsive web and mobile apps, leveraging modern frameworks such as Vite, React Query, Context API, and CSS libraries.
• Integrate AI/ML APIs, LLM-driven features, and automation tooling into the product roadmap.
• Design and implement scalable, secure, and cloud-ready architectures to support rapid user growth.
• Translate product strategy into technical execution in close collaboration with the leadership team.
• Build technical processes and infrastructure to support a fast-growing user base, with experience scaling beyond one million users.
• Play a foundational role in growing the engineering team over time, including mentoring and hiring.

Nice to Have

• Experience with orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph) and multi-agent workflows.
• Familiarity with vector databases, RAG pipelines, and lightweight model hosting.
• Ability to set up data pipelines and feedback loops for improving AI-driven features.
• Awareness of emerging areas such as multimodal AI, edge AI, and AI applications in DevOps/observability.

The Ideal Candidate

• A hands-on engineer comfortable moving quickly in a start-up environment.
• Excited by the opportunity to take ownership as the first technical hire and grow into a senior leadership role.
• Strong communicator who can collaborate directly with product leadership.
• Previous experience scaling consumer-facing apps to millions of users.
• Motivated by the challenge of building meaningful technology that helps people connect in healthier, more authentic ways.

Why Join

• Join at a pivotal stage, with the ability to shape the product and culture from the ground up.
• Be part of a team passionate about creating a new kind of social platform focused on real connections.
• Clear progression path into a senior engineering leadership role as the team grows.