Lead Software Engineer

Lead Engineer (Founding Engineer > Head of Engineering path) Python, TypeScript, LLM integrations, ML pipelines, payment infra At Wave Talent, we don't want to consume any more of your time trying to decipher job descriptions to identify the information you need. Instead, we spoke with you all to understand the key information you'd like to know about a job position before you enter the process. Hopefully, you'll find this listed below and if the job role sounds like it could be up your street; we'd love to arrange a chat to give you more info. We've partnered with a pre-seed fintech building the trust layer for agentic commerce, the missing piece that lets AI agents actually be trusted to make purchases on someone's behalf. They're hiring their first engineer to build the product end to end alongside the founders. Here's everything you need to know: 💰 Salary: £120,000 - £140,000 per annum + significant equity. 💻 Benefits: Meaningful equity in a category-defining pre-seed business, direct access to the founding team, genuine ownership over technical direction from day one. 🚀 Industry/Type of business: Fintech, risk infrastructure for agentic commerce. 🏠 Work location: 3 days a week in their Shoreditch, London office (currently Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, though not fixed). 🧩 Interview process: 3 stages: culture fit, a systems architecture discussion with a VC partner, and a take-home plus on-site working session. 🦄 Reporting to: Founders. 👏 Company size: Founding team of 2 at present, hiring this role as the first engineer with plans to build out a small team underneath over time. 🎯 Working on: Building a first-of-its-kind risk engine that quantifies whether an AI agent's purchase actually matches what the user wanted, combining traditional ML, LLM-as-judge and human-in-the-loop checks. Alongside this, you'll build the payment infrastructure layer that enables agent transactions, working directly with design partners to get it into production with real transaction data. ⏰ Why now: People are delegating far more to AI than they were even a year ago, and are getting comfortable letting it act on their behalf. The one thing still holding that back at scale is trust in autonomous purchases. Nobody has solved this yet, so there's a genuine window to define the category and become the default trust layer before anyone else does. We'd love to chat with you about this position if: ✅ You've operated in a start-up or scale-up environment previously. The 'silver bullet' experience will be someone who has a mixture of start-up and big-tech/scale-up experience. ✅ You're strong across system architecture and comfortable owning APIs, data pipelines and infrastructure decisions solo. ✅ You have depth in either ML infrastructure or shipping payment experiences, neither are essential, but either will make you stand out. ✅ Your stack is Python or TypeScript (their SDKs are Python-first), though candidates who are stronger in other languages will be considered - they're heavy AI users. ✅ You're commercially minded as well as technical, comfortable in a room with both a CEO and a CTO, and genuinely enjoy being hands-on rather than looking to move straight into management. Whilst candidates who don't have this experience will be considered, we prefer to be transparent as to what background the ideal candidate will have. If this sounds like you, I'd love to chat 👋