Founding Software Engineer

Founding Engineer – R&D Prototyping Fully Remote – UK | Up to £500/day | Outside IR35 | Initial contract to April 2027 Build the thing that proves what should be built next. We’re working with an established, employee-owned B2B SaaS business that is creating a new R&D function to operate more like a start-up studio than a conventional engineering team. This is a genuinely exploratory engineering role. You’ll identify valuable customer problems, turn them into hypotheses, build rapid prototypes, put those prototypes in front of real users and use the evidence to decide what deserves to become a product. This is not a backlog-delivery contract. You won’t be handed a perfectly formed Jira ticket and asked to turn it into production code. You’ll be given an open problem, the freedom to investigate it and the responsibility to turn uncertainty into something customers can actually react to. The environment The company develops SaaS products within the Salesforce ecosystem, helping organisations manage areas such as routing, work assignment, workflow and scheduling. Its established engineering team will continue to build, maintain and scale the core production platform. Alongside this, the new R&D team will focus on finding the next problems worth solving. The model is simple: Discover → Prototype → Test → Learn → Decide The strongest concepts will be handed across to the core product and engineering teams for productionisation. Others will be refined or deliberately discarded. What you’ll do Learn the RevOps, CRM and Salesforce ecosystem deeply enough to identify recurring pain points and emerging opportunities.Speak directly with customers, prospects and practitioners rather than relying solely on second-hand requirements.Turn observations into clear, testable hypotheses around the problem, user and commercial opportunity.Build lightweight prototypes, functional spikes, mocked interfaces and demos — whatever produces useful evidence fastest.Use AI-assisted engineering tools to move from an idea to something demonstrable in days rather than months.Put concepts in front of users and test genuine behaviour, switching appetite and commercial value.Work out whether to iterate, progress a concept into product development or stop and pursue something more valuable.Document validated concepts clearly enough for another engineering team to turn them into secure, maintainable production software.Contribute to the wider technical environment, including Salesforce/Apex, where appropriate. Success is learning at speed. You won’t be judged by how much experimental code survives. You’ll be judged by whether the team learns quickly enough to invest in the right opportunities and avoid spending months building the wrong ones. You’ve operated like a founding engineer. You’re comfortable when the problem is broad, the answer is unknown and nobody has written the specification yet. You’re commercially curious. You want to understand what customers do today, what alternatives they use, what frustrates them, whether they would switch and whether they would actually pay for something better. You use AI as part of modern software engineering. You’re comfortable using AI coding and research tools to accelerate experimentation while retaining technical judgement over the output. You’re language-agnostic. Your strongest experience might be Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java or something else entirely. Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly matter more than allegiance to a particular stack. You’re comfortable with customers. You can ask good questions, challenge assumptions, demonstrate unfinished ideas and turn feedback into decisions. Any of the following would be particularly relevant: Founding Engineer or early-stage engineering experience within B2B SaaSRapid prototyping or product discoveryVenture building or innovation teamsForward Deployed EngineeringApplied AI / LLM products Please apply or get in touch if you have any questions.