Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage AI infrastructure company building a production-grade gateway that sits between applications and hundreds of large language model providers. You'll work directly with the founders to shape the technical direction of a platform that powers reliability, observability, and cost optimisation for AI-first teams. This is a high-ownership, high-impact position for someone who thinks like a founder.

What You'll Do

• Design and build core backend services within a pragmatic microservices architecture, primarily in Go.

• Evolve and maintain the LLM gateway, including routing, failover, load balancing, and observability features.

• Make architectural decisions that balance scalability, performance, and the speed demands of an early-stage product.

• Select and work with a variety of SQL databases and distributed caches, choosing the right tool for each problem.

• Contribute to infrastructure running on Kubernetes, and help redefine the stack as the product scales.

• Collaborate closely with founders to influence product direction and technical strategy.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with strong hands-on expertise in Go (Golang).

• Deep understanding of concurrency and practical experience with concurrent programming patterns.

• Experience designing and operating microservices architectures, including API gateways.

• Comfort working with multiple database types and distributed caching solutions, and the judgment to choose between them.

• Ability to design architectures that are both pragmatic for the current stage and scalable for the future.

• A track record of independently learning new technologies and frameworks.

• Startup or high-growth environment mindset — strong ownership, bias for action, and comfort with ambiguity.

• Right to work in the United Kingdom; visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Compensation & Benefits

Competitive total compensation package with significant equity. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in London, United Kingdom.