Founding Engineer

Tekton Dynamics (YC W24); Greater London; On-site; GBP 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private health insurance

Pension contributions

Free lunch

Curiosity allowance

Job summary

Tekton Dynamics is seeking a Founding Engineer to join our multi-disciplinary product engineering team. You’ll research, plan, and develop systems across the stack, fusing software, hardware, and networks in our R&D lab and customer sites.

This role goes beyond a typical software engineer: you’ll install vision sensors, calibrate robotics, and help deploy welding-focused AI systems in real-world environments. You’ll collaborate with a pioneering team and partners across the UK, Europe, and US.

Qualifications

• 3+ years shipping software in highly technical startup environments.
• T-shaped systems and software generalist.
• Designed, built and deployed software as part of an engineering team.
• Comfortable debugging edge networks and hardware calibration.

Responsibilities

• Develop systems across the engineering stack in R&D lab and customer facilities.
• Install and calibrate vision sensors and fusion pipelines.
• Tune robot motion planning and collision avoidance stack.
• Collaborate with external vendors and integrators for robotic cells.

Skills

Software engineering

Systems design

Robotics familiarity

First principles thinking

Debugging edge networks

Tools

Vision sensors

Edge compute

Robot hardware

Job description

Location: Our industrial lab near London Bridge, in person 5 days/week, occasional travel to industry partners across the UK, Europe, and the US.

Competitive salary: GBP 100-150K + bonus + meaningful equity.

About Tekton Dynamics

At Tekton Dynamics, we are on a mission to empower every manufacturer, no matter their scale, to invent and build anything using intelligent robots.

We are building the AI-powered control layer for industrial robots — starting with welding.

Take a look at what we’re building and how we operate.

We are:

• Backed by Y Combinator and founders of PayPal, Affim, Slack – with a $6M seed round. Scout investments by Sequoia, a16z, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins.
• Founding team of AI PhDs and previous startup CTOs – everyone has a founder/CTO background.
• Building with real industry partners from the start – focused on shipping robotic solutions for real-world deployment in record time.

Your Role

As Tekton Dynamic’s Founding Engineer, you’ll operate as a core member of our multi-disciplinary product engineering team. You'll be researching, planning, and developing systems and software across our entire engineering stack.

This is not a typical “Software Engineer” role. You’ll design, build, and maintain core systems that fuse software, hardware and networks. You’ll be both in the weeds with deeply technical subject matter across software, robotics, and AI — and hands-on installing vision sensors, industrial robots, and welding equipment in our R&D lab and our customers’ production facilities.

We value “T-shaped” engineers who:

• Dive into subject matter they are unfamiliar with
• Apply first principles to solve technical problems
• Index on solving the right problems over finding the perfect solution
• Debate with data and logic, and then commit fully to executing team decisions
• Appreciate that delivering customer value requires communicating and building trust with our customers

Must-haves:

• 3+ years shipping software in highly technical startup environments
• “T-shaped” systems and software generalist
• Designed, built and deployed software as part of an engineering team
• Comfortable and confident in debugging messy reality: edge networks, hardware calibration, sim-to-real gap
• Proven team player, clear communicator; you think from first principles, you identify assumptions and test them methodically, you question the ‘why’ behind every decision

Nice-to-haves:

• Familiarity with training and evaluating machine learning pipelines
• Experience in harsh industrial settings (welding/fabrication/heavy industry)
• Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
• Robotics and/or computer vision experience
• Edge compute deployments, latency optimization and reliability monitoring

Example areas you’d be involved in:

Industrial workflows

• Process 3D CAD models into efficient data structures
• Create declarative representations of complex industrial processes

Perception

• Install, calibrate, and optimize vision sensor capture and fusion pipelines
• Train and deploy computer vision models for processing 2D/3D images

Robot Control and Command

• Tune and optimize our robot motion planning and collision avoidance stack
• Build and train AI/machine learning based systems to handle real-world welding scenarios

Systems, hardware, and integration

• Design and construct sensor enclosures to protect sensors and edge devices
• Design robust network architectures with redundancy to ensure always-on and secure access to edge devices
• Engage external vendors and integrators to plan and install robotic cells
• Private health insurance + pension contributions
• Free lunch
• Curiosity allowance (books, learning, memberships)

A note on our in-office culture: Our team works in our industrial lab near London Bridge five days a week. In our opinion, it’s a core requirement for building physical AI - and we love it. Please only apply if this excites you too.