Summary
✨ AI‑Generated
Join an early-stage stealth venture as a founding software engineer working at the intersection of machine learning and payments. You will build a new risk engine from the ground up, using approaches such as supervised learning and LLM-based evaluation to quantify novel risks in autonomous purchasing systems. The role is hybrid and offers compensation up to £140,000 plus meaningful equity.
Highlights
Founding engineering opportunity with compensation up to £140,000 plus meaningful equity, focused on building novel risk technology at the intersection of machine learning, payments, and autonomous commerce.
Description
Founding Engineer - Stealth Agentic Commerce Startup 🕵️
Hybrid in London Office
Up to £140k + Meaningful Equity
They're building the trust layer for agentic commerce (yes, they know "agentic" is doing a lot of work right now, bear with them).
Here's the pitch: soon, commerce will be agent-led.
You tell an agent what you want, it goes and buys it.
Autonomously.
No shopper is going to hand over their card details to a robot unless they're sure it'll buy the right thing - the right size nappies, not the ones your baby outgrew three months ago.
That's not fraud, that's not a hack, it's a totally new risk category they call "alignment risk." And right now, nobody has solved it.
They're building the buyer-protection layer and risk engine to fix that.
What you'll actually build:
The risk model - go from bootstrapped spreadsheets to an actual risk engine that can quantify "alignment risk" using whatever mix of supervised learning, LLM-as-judge, and other tricks gets you there.
Nothing like this exists yet, so you're not implementing a known playbook, you're writing it.
The payment flows — build on the newest agentic commerce protocols so the risk layer plugs into real payment flows, sometimes building those flows from scratch alongside partners.
Uncharted territory, bleeding-edge tech, straight to production.
What could go wrong.
What they need:
A founding engineer who'll build the whole thing end-to-end with the founders Backend ML, payment orchestration, the lot.
You've shipped production software end-to-end.
Bonus points the closer it was to an actual 0-to-1 story.You've got real depth in ML infra or payments (ideally both, but they'll take one).You make sharp calls on imperfect information — you know when to over-engineer and when to duct-tape it and ship.High agency, low ego.
You're the kind of person who:
Cares (maybe too much) about craftsmanship.Gets genuinely curious about users, new tech, weird ways of building things.Has taste — you think about the UX implications of your choices, and you're partial to calm tech over chaos.Ships fast, iterates faster, and doesn't get precious about it.Brings good energy - robust debate, healthy appetite for silliness.
