Founding Engineer / Product Architect

About the Company We are working with a seed-stage AI startup backed by top-tier venture investors that is building a new enterprise AI infrastructure platform. About the Role They are looking for a Founding Engineer / Product Architect at Principal or Senior Principal level to take technical ownership of the platform from the ground up. This is a genuinely hands-on founding role. You will make many of the architectural decisions the company and product will be built around — from the core distributed systems and cloud architecture through to the services and workflows customers use. You will report directly to the CEO and act as the technical lead for the product platform. The expectation is approximately 60% hands-on product development, with the remaining time split between technical/product research and direct engagement with customers and partners. Responsibilities Own the end-to-end architecture of a new AI infrastructure platform.Design and build large-scale, highly available distributed systems.Build production software that operates across cloud, on-prem and hybrid environments.Make foundational decisions around languages, frameworks, infrastructure and system architecture.Design control planes, APIs, backend services and customer-facing platform workflows.Work directly with early customers and design partners to translate real requirements into product capabilities.Build for performance, reliability, security and operational simplicity from day one.Use modern AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or equivalent.Establish engineering standards and technical practices as the engineering organisation grows.Mentor future engineers while remaining deeply hands-on. Qualifications 12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.Operating at Principal, Senior Principal, Distinguished, Senior Staff or equivalent level. Required Skills Strong track record designing and building large-scale distributed systems.Deep experience with Kubernetes, containers and cloud-native infrastructure.Strong experience across AWS, Azure and/or GCP.Experience with infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform, Pulumi or equivalent.Strong systems fundamentals across backend architecture, APIs, performance, scalability and reliability.Strong programming capability in C++ or Rust.Experience shipping and operating production-grade software.Comfortable owning major technical decisions with limited information and moving quickly from idea to production.Able to work directly with customers and communicate complex architectural decisions clearly.Strong bias towards building rather than purely designing or managing. Preferred Skills AI/ML infrastructure experience.Distributed training or inference infrastructure.GPU/accelerator infrastructure.Model serving or ML platform experience.Multi-cloud architecture.Software deployed into customer-managed/on-prem environments.Kubernetes control-plane or orchestration experience.Security infrastructure including IAM, access control, KMS, secrets management or trusted computing.Previous founding engineer or early-stage startup experience.Experience taking a major platform or infrastructure product from 0→1.