Founding Engineer

Closeday; Greater London; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Impact

Influence

Ownership

Culture

Job summary

Closeday is rebuilding insolvency as a software-powered service. You’ll join as the first engineering hire, working directly with the CTO and co-founders. You’ll lead hands-on building, owning platform capabilities and guiding others as the team scales.

Based remotely in the UK, you’ll help shape a fast-moving, high-trust startup culture that blends engineering leadership with pragmatic product delivery and AI-enabled automation.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience setting up production infrastructure: deploys, CI/CD, monitoring or databases.
• Strong engineering judgment in system design, architecture, security and reliability.
• You have lived with your own decisions and stayed long enough in past roles.
• A big believer in AI and an early, hands-on adopter.
• You take vague problems to production; zero-to-one experience is a strong plus.
• Product sense; you make everyday product trade-offs and learn quickly.
• Rails is a plus; familiarity with monolith-first stacks is welcome.
• Comfort with ambiguity in a fast, half-built startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Ship substantial initiatives yourself from a vague problem to production that expand the platform's coverage and automation.
• Be our second engineering anchor; keep the whole platform moving and joined up.
• Build building blocks and guardrails to enable fast, safe delivery with AI.
• Own large platform capabilities such as integrations with postal, banking and accounting systems, AI document search, and security.
• Evolve our agent harness: tools, context, evals and guardrails for case agents.
• Help set up our on-call rotation and participate in it.
• Work closely with the founders, insolvency practitioners and case managers to scope work.

Skills

Infra setup

Engineering judgment

AI adoption

Product sense

Ambiguity tolerance

Rails experience

Tools

Rails

Job description

Today, closing a company can be time-consuming, opaque and expensive. Closeday is reimagining corporate insolvency. We combine deep industry expertise with modern technology and AI to make case processing faster, smarter and more transparent. We're on a mission to close companies faster, lower costs, and return more to stakeholders as quickly as possible.

Founded by a team of highly experienced entrepreneurs, Closeday is UK-first, but international by design. We have hubs in London, Copenhagen and Barcelona. We are well-funded to execute on an ambitious, multi-year roadmap. We move fast, think pragmatically, and care deeply about excellence, collaboration and building something genuinely transformative. All while having fun in a high-trust environment.

What we're building

Closeday is a professional services firm built like a software company. We don't sell software to insolvency practitioners. We deliver the service ourselves, end to end. We start with insolvency.

Today, we hold real insolvency appointments, and live cases run through our platform every day. Automation and agents already handle a growing share of the work, and our practitioners review and sign off on it. We work agent-first ourselves: most of our code is written with agents, and non-engineers ship changes safely.

Our vision is a service that runs on agents. Agents do the intelligence work end to end: gathering data, drafting, checking and filing. People handle judgement, exceptions and regulated sign-off. Our licensed practitioners keep the judgement and the accountability. The result is a process that is faster, more transparent and more thorough than the industry has ever managed.

Why it matters

We are building one of the first agent-run professional services firms, starting with insolvency. When we have proven it here, the same approach can transform other regulated professions. Along the way, we make one of the hardest moments for a director faster, clearer and less stressful.

The hard problems you'll work on

• Automation, deterministic and agentic. Decide where work should follow fixed, predictable rules, and where agents should reason and act on their own. Combine both safely, so cases move fast without surprises.
• Review tools for agent work. Build tools that let practitioners review agent work as efficiently as engineers review code in a pull request: what changed, why, on what evidence, and how risky it is. They approve, correct or guide it.
• Risk-based review. Decide what needs a human and what does not. Routine work flows through with automated checks, and regulated or high-risk steps always get a practitioner's review. As trust grows, the line moves.
• Each review teaches the system. Practitioners' corrections become rules, checks and better agent behaviour, so the next case needs less review. Today's judgement becomes tomorrow's automation.

The role

First engineering hire. Work side by side with a founder team that builds.

You'll join as our first engineering hire and work directly with our CTO and co-founder, Christian Hølmer. Most of your time goes into hands-on building. You'll have real technical leadership and ownership, with no people management.

What you'll do

• Ship substantial initiatives yourself, from a vague problem to production, that move how much of the casework our platform covers and automates.
• Be our second engineering anchor. Know the whole platform, keep it moving and joined up, and review and guide changes from others on the team.
• Build the building blocks and guardrails that let the whole team, developers and non-developers, ship faster and safely with AI.
• Own large platform capabilities, such as integrations with postal, banking and accounting systems, AI document search, our phone infrastructure, and authorisation and security.
• Evolve our agent harness: the tools, context, evals and guardrails our case agents run on. Make agents more capable and more reliable, and know when to hand over to a person.
• Help set up our on-call rotation and take part in it.
• Work closely with the founders, insolvency practitioners and case managers to scope work and find the biggest unlocks.

What you bring

• Hands-on experience setting up production infrastructure yourself: deploys, CI/CD, monitoring or databases.
• Strong engineering judgment in system design, architecture, security and reliability. You weigh trade-offs and prefer the simple solution.
• You have lived with your own decisions. You stayed long enough in past roles to see what held up and what didn't.
• A big believer in AI, and an early, hands-on adopter. You have shipped real work with AI agents for a year or more and can show examples.
• You take vague problems to production. Zero-to-one experience is a strong plus.
• Product sense. You make everyday product trade-offs on your own, challenge scope, and learn a complex domain fast.
• Rails is a plus. Deep experience in a similar monolith-first stack (for example Django, Laravel or Phoenix) is just as welcome.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a fast, half-built startup environment. You see creative freedom rather than gaps.

How we build

• A simple, modern Rails monolith that follows the framework's strong conventions, so agents and people can move fast in it.
• Agent-first workflows with the harnesses that work best, such as Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi and OMP. Parallel agents, agents orchestrating other agents, and AI-assisted review.
• Strong guardrails: tests, linters and architecture checks keep agent work safe.

Where you'll work

• Remote, based in the UK, Spain or Denmark.
• Regular in-person time in London, Copenhagen or Barcelona, for example team days.

Why Closeday

• Equity: share in the upside of the business you help build.
• Impact: help prove a new model for professional services, starting with insolvency.
• Influence: a voice at the table from day one, as our first engineering hire.
• Ownership: real technical leadership over a platform that already runs live cases.
• Culture: fast, collaborative, international and fun. Scandinavian-style work/life balance.

How we hire

• An initial conversation with Heart Mind Talent.
• A conversation with Hølmer, our CTO and co-founder.
• A hands-on working session with AI agents on a realistic task.
• A technical deep dive into a project you have built.
• Conversations with our other co-founders.
• Reference checks.

If you want to help build one of the first agent-run professional services firms, and you believe the best way to do it is with people and agents working side by side, we'd love to speak with you.