Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer North Stack | United Kingdom, remote with occasional client travel | Base + Equity North Stack is appointing a Founding Engineer to own how its systems are built. The MissionNorth Stack's mission is to be the go-to company when enterprises want to understand how new regulations will impact them and build the infrastructure to gather the data. We exist to give regulated firms a single, live view of every obligation they carry. Compliance in these industries is still assembled by hand: consultants emailing the business for figures, returns keyed into spreadsheets, each regulatory line tracked separately and rebuilt from scratch every cycle. We build the AI systems that replace that work, mapping a firm's full regulatory landscape, gathering the evidence automatically against the regulatory calendar, and turning it into something leadership can interrogate rather than something their teams spend the year compiling. Our aim is to make that landscape permanent infrastructure: mapped once, maintained continuously, and trusted well enough that risk, compliance and the board all read from the same picture. The business has signed enterprise clients and is carrying a pipeline of further enterprise opportunities across its target sectors. Delivery currently depends on the founders and a technical advisor, and the same systems are being rebuilt for each client rather than developed once and deployed repeatedly. The Founding Engineer is being appointed to take permanent ownership of the engineering, and to turn what has been proven in client work into a platform the business can sell many times over. The RoleReporting to the founder and director, and working alongside the co-founder and the technical advisor, the Founding Engineer will assume ownership of how North Stack builds. The mandate is to deliver client engagements to production standard and, from that work, to build the shared platform underneath them, including RegPulse, the regulatory monitoring product the consulting work is converging on. This is the first permanent engineering appointment. The successful candidate will set the technical standard, make the architectural calls, and be the person every engineer hired afterwards is measured against. You Will Own delivery end to end. Take an engagement from discovery through the fixed-fee proof of the hardest part into a production system the client depends on daily, and be accountable for it once it is live.Build the platform, not just the project. Identify what recurs across client builds, extract it, and turn it into shared infrastructure. RegPulse is the first product to come out of that process; it will not be the last.Engineer for supervision. Build agents that operate MFA-gated portals and legacy systems with no usable API, pausing for explicit per-action human approval, escalating anything unexpected through a failure playbook, and writing a complete, exportable audit trail behind every action.Hold the red lines. We never automate a payment, we never automate a change to bank details, and no submission reaches a regulator without explicit human sign-off. Those exclusions are the product's credibility, and the engineering has to enforce them rather than rely on people remembering them.Set the standard. Establish how we test, evaluate, deploy, monitor and control access, at a level that survives a client's security review and a regulator's interest.Work in front of clients. Sit in discovery, assess feasibility honestly, and hold a technical conversation with a head of risk or an IT director without the founders translating.Say when it will not work. Judge which workflows are worth automating and which should be left alone, and say so before anyone has paid for a build.Build the team. Set the hiring bar for the engineers who follow, and shape how they work.You Have A track record of shipping production software that other people depended on, and of operating it afterwards. Prototypes and proofs of concept are not the same job.Strong engineering fundamentals in a modern typed stack, with the range to work across backend, data and enough interface work to build the review and approval screens these systems need.Real experience building with large language models beyond the demo stage: retrieval, structured extraction from messy documents, evaluation, and honest handling of cost, latency and failure modes.The judgement to design for the case where the model is wrong. In this market that is a first-order design problem, not an edge case.Credibility with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike, including clients who are sceptical and, in many cases, have been sold AI badly before.Comfort operating without a platform team, a QA function or an established codebase to inherit. You will build the thing you would otherwise have relied on.Desirable Sector exposure to financial services, insurance, legal, healthcare or energy, or any environment where an audit trail mattered.Production browser automation, and a clear understanding of why it usually breaks.Document-heavy pipelines: extraction, classification, reconciliation, and the long tail of formats real businesses actually hold.Experience taking consulting work and turning it into a product, where the hard part is deciding what to generalise.Familiarity with the AI governance landscape, including the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and DORA, and its effect on what can be deployed.Remuneration Base salary of £65,000 to £85,000 depending on experience, with a founding equity grant materially larger than a standard early hire, through an EMI option scheme vesting over four years with a one-year cliff. The package is deliberately weighted towards equity rather than cash, and the base sits below what a comparable engineer would earn in London. This is stated openly rather than discovered late: the business is looking for an engineer who wants ownership of what gets built. Where salary is the priority, candidates are encouraged to establish that at the outset. Why This Role Most engineering roles in AI are building demonstrations, or maintaining someone else's platform. This is neither. The systems here operate inside regulated businesses, against real obligations, with permanent limits on what they are allowed to do, and they are judged on whether a compliance function will stand behind their output. North Stack has taken the harder market and established a position in it, with enterprise clients that prove the model and a pipeline to scale it against. The engineering organisation is being built now, and the person appointed will be the one who builds it. Process The start date is 1 October, although the business will wait for the right appointment. There is no application form. Interested candidates should contact Matthew Place directly through LinkedIn, or at matthew@northstack.digital, describing something they have built that other people relied on, and what they would want to build first here.