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 systemsDeveloping event-driven systems that react to live operational dataWorking on agentic AI and automated decision-making systemsDesigning real-time data infrastructure and state-synchronisation systemsBuilding predictive systems that identify operational conflicts before they escalateOwning architecture, implementation, deployment and production reliabilityDeploying software directly into customer environmentsWorking closely with operators and customers to understand real-world requirementsContributing 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 systemsExperience with backend, distributed, real-time or event-driven systemsThe ability to independently architect and deliver substantial parts of a productStrong product judgement and comfort working directly with customersHigh levels of agency, proactivity and ownershipA willingness to work across infrastructure, AI, product and deployment problemsAn ability to operate effectively in a small, fast-moving engineering teamRelevant 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-siteFull-timeApplicants must already have the right to work in the UKVisa sponsorship is not currently availableCompetitive compensation and meaningful early-stage equityIf 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.