Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer

📍 London — On-site

🏗 Engineering | Early-stage | Meaningful equity

We’re hiring a Founding Engineer to help build the coordination layer for critical infrastructure.

The company is building a real-time orchestration platform for airport operations — replacing fragmented radio calls, spreadsheets and manual coordination with software that can understand live operational state, predict conflicts and trigger decisions before delays cascade.

Backed by $3.3M in pre-seed funding and already deployed in a live airport environment, the team is now expanding its engineering function.

What You’ll Work On

You’ll take genuine end-to-end ownership across the product, including:

• Building high-throughput, low-latency backend and distributed systems
• Developing event-driven systems that react to live operational data
• Working on agentic AI and automated decision-making systems
• Designing real-time data infrastructure and state-synchronisation systems
• Building predictive systems that identify operational conflicts before they escalate
• Owning architecture, implementation, deployment and production reliability
• Deploying software directly into customer environments
• Working closely with operators and customers to understand real-world requirements
• Contributing to technical hiring as the engineering team grows

What We’re Looking For

This is a high-ownership founding engineering role for someone who wants to build, ship and own complex software from the ground up.

You’ll likely have:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building complex production systems
• Experience with backend, distributed, real-time or event-driven systems
• The ability to independently architect and deliver substantial parts of a product
• Strong product judgement and comfort working directly with customers
• High levels of agency, proactivity and ownership
• A willingness to work across infrastructure, AI, product and deployment problems
• An ability to operate effectively in a small, fast-moving engineering team

Relevant experience may include agentic AI, distributed systems, real-time infrastructure, optimisation, logistics, aviation or other operationally complex environments.

The Environment

You’ll join a small, talent-dense team with backgrounds spanning Imperial College London, Formula 1, the FIA and Lufthansa.

The product is already being used in a live operational environment, so you’ll be building against real customer workflows rather than hypothetical use cases.

This is a hands-on role with significant responsibility. You’ll be expected to identify problems, make technical decisions, execute quickly and take ownership through to production.

The role also includes occasional customer deployments, currently around one week per month when participating in an implementation. Travel will rotate across the team and is expected to reduce as the company grows.

Location & Requirements

• Central London — on-site
• Full-time
• Applicants must already have the right to work in the UK
• Visa sponsorship is not currently available
• Competitive compensation and meaningful early-stage equity

If you want to join a small team, own major parts of a technically difficult product and build software that coordinates real-world infrastructure in real time, this is an opportunity to have significant impact from an early stage.