Founding AI Engineer

Dahling Ltd; Manchester; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity / share options

Job summary

Dahling Ltd in Manchester is seeking a founding AI Engineer to work directly with the founders and take technical ownership of the platform, shaping the architecture, building the core product and making key technology decisions as the business moves from concept to scalable product.

You’ll be hands-on in early iterations, defining the engineering roadmap, selecting models and infrastructure, and building integrations while helping to grow the founding team and share in the business value.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical architecture and engineering roadmap.
• Build the core platform from the ground up.
• Select the appropriate models, infrastructure and technology stack.
• Develop the data and AI architecture underpinning the product.
• Build integrations with external data sources and APIs.
• Design systems capable of understanding relationships between people, companies, work and market activity.
• Turn large volumes of fragmented information into structured, searchable intelligence.
• Prototype rapidly, test assumptions and move successful concepts into production.
• Establish engineering standards as the platform develops.
• Help build the future engineering and product team.
• Initially, architect and build hands-on rather than managing a large team.

Job description

My client is building an AI platform designed to bring structure, intelligence and context to a highly fragmented professional market.

The MVP has been defined and the next stage is to build the technology behind it.

They are looking for a Founding AI Engineer to work directly with the founders and take technical ownership of the platform, shaping the architecture, building the core product and making the key technology decisions as the business moves from concept and MVP into a scalable product.

This is not a role maintaining an existing technology stack. You will have significant influence over what gets built, how it gets built and the technical direction of the company.

What you’ll be building

The platform will bring together large volumes of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and turn that information into usable intelligence.

The technical challenge spans:

• AI and LLM-powered applications
• Data ingestion and enrichment pipelines
• Entity resolution and data matching
• Knowledge graphs and structured data models
• Retrieval and RAG architectures
• Agentic workflows and orchestration
• APIs and third-party integrations
• Search, ranking and recommendation
• Product and platform architecture
• Data quality, provenance and validation

You will be responsible for translating the existing product vision and MVP into a robust technical architecture, while remaining hands-on in building the first iterations of the platform.

The role

As the founding engineer, you’ll work closely with the founders to:

• Define the technical architecture and engineering roadmap
• Build the core platform from the ground up
• Select the appropriate models, infrastructure and technology stack
• Develop the data and AI architecture underpinning the product
• Build integrations with external data sources and APIs
• Design systems capable of understanding relationships between people, companies, work and market activity
• Turn large volumes of fragmented information into structured, searchable intelligence
• Prototype rapidly, test assumptions and move successful concepts into production
• Establish engineering standards as the platform develops
• Help build the future engineering and product team

Initially, this is a highly hands-on role. You’ll be expected to architect and build, rather than manage a large engineering team.

About you

You’ll likely have experience building AI-native products or complex data platforms from an early stage.

You don’t need to have worked in this particular industry, but you should be comfortable working with messy real-world data and solving problems where the answer isn’t simply another SaaS integration.

Experience across several of the following would be particularly relevant

Most importantly, you’ll be someone who enjoys the ambiguity and ownership that comes with building a product at the beginning — someone capable of moving between architecture, product thinking and writing production code.

The opportunity

This is an opportunity to become part of the founding team rather than simply joining as an employee once the product has already been built.

Alongside a competitive salary, the package will include a share in the business, giving the successful person meaningful participation in the value they help create.