Founding Engineer

Acceler8 Talent; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding equity

Coding credits

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent is seeking a founding engineer to own the backend for a real-time operations platform. You will shape the product by translating on-site operational insights into scalable software and collaborate with customers to guide a growing engineering team.

The role emphasizes a startup mindset, production-grade delivery, and experience with event-driven architectures. London-based with remote considered by exception.

Qualifications

• 2-3 years of production engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Python and TypeScript.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS and event-driven architectures.
• Strong startup mindset and ability to work on-site in London.

Responsibilities

• Own the backend end to end across backend, DevOps, and ML/AI.
• Translate operation lessons into product and guide future hiring.
• Work with customers to understand needs and ensure production-grade delivery.
• Be comfortable with distributed systems and integrations with legacy systems.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Backend development

DevOps

Event-driven

Distributed systems

Startup mindset

Job description

Founding Engineer – Real-Time Operations Platform

The priority candidates for this role are Full Stack & Agentic Engineers

You should come from a top university, with a strong start-up mindset.

The Problem

Critical infrastructure, transportation and logistics may look organized from the outside, but behind the scenes they often rely on radios, spreadsheets, emails, paper manifests, phone calls and constant improvisation.

Plans are built statically for operations that change by the minute: delays, location changes, sick calls, broken equipment and knock-on effects across the system. Humans cannot reliably manage this complexity at operating speed, so teams compensate with overstaffing and operational slack, and still miss resources when they matter most.

The Technical Challenge

This is a coordination platform, not a tool for a single industry.

The backend operates two loops over a domain-independent model of tasks, resources, events, constraints and plans:

• A reactive loop that keeps live operational state accurate as events arrive.
• A forward scheduler that produces the plan before a shift starts.

The reality is messy. Events arrive late, out of order and duplicated. Upstream feeds disconnect and replay. Multiple operators modify overlapping state simultaneously.

You’ll tackle problems including exactly-once effects on at-least-once delivery, concurrent-write conflict resolution, bounded read latency, state consistency and zero-downtime deployments.

The bigger platform challenge is handling variation. Every site, customer and eventually industry brings different source systems, event feeds, communication channels, labour rules and definitions of a task — often on infrastructure outside your control.

What We’re Looking For

You’ll own the backend end to end, including:

• Will work across all of the following though can be more specialized in one if they want
• Backend, DevOps, and ML/AI roles — the stack is Python and TypeScript, the environment is event-driven, the bar is production-grade.
• 2-3 years of experience is the sweet spot: enough to have shipped real things and pushed them to production safely, not so much that startup pace feels foreign.
• Applied AI and customer-facing infrastructure experience is a strong plus

This is a founding engineering role. You’ll go on site, understand how the operation actually works and translate those lessons directly into the product. You’ll work with customers and help hire the engineers who follow you.

Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, event-driven architectures, distributed systems or integrations with difficult legacy systems is highly relevant. The frontend is TypeScript, so you should be comfortable reasoning across that boundary without needing to own it.

Above all, we’re looking for highly agentic engineers who move without waiting for instructions, enjoy difficult technical problems and maintain high standards when systems are live and the stakes are real.

Salary is not a constraint for the right person. The role includes meaningful founding equity and coding credits.

London-based | Remote only by exception | UK work authorization preferred