Founding Engineer

AISSURED; Reading; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

AISSURED is a governance-focused software company building an enterprise-scale platform that sits between AI agents and regulated enterprises. As a founding engineer, you will own and scale the core technology, from the canonical governance event schema to the multi-tenant AWS infrastructure, turning a validated MVP into an enterprise-grade platform.

You will work directly with the founder/CEO, influence product decisions, and shape engineering culture while collaborating with design partners

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including backend/distributed systems.
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred) and infrastructure-as-code.
• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs in shipped products or serious projects.
• Experience in a startup or small team with end-to-end ownership.

Responsibilities

• Co-create and shape the product roadmap with the CEO and early adopters.
• Design, build, and ship the core platform: governance event ingestion and reasoning engine.
• Implement operating modes: advisory, escalation, and enforcement.
• Build LLM-powered evaluation pipelines with prompting, evals, and guardrails.
• Own the AWS multi-account, multi-tenant architecture and security.
• Shape engineering culture and scale the team as the company grows.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

LLM APIs

AWS

Infrastructure as code

System architecture

Regulatory requirements understanding

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field

Tools

Terraform

Job description

The next five years will fundamentally reshape enterprise software as autonomous AI agents move from experimentation into production. Organisations need foundational capability that can reason about AI behaviour continuously—not just produce logs or reports. We believe this creates an opportunity to build an entirely new software category.

AISSURED is The Governance Reasoning Company. We're building the reasoning layer that sits between AI agents and the regulated enterprises that deploy them — evaluating agent behaviour in real time and producing defensible, auditable verdicts. Enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than they can govern them. Observability tells you what an agent did; AISSURED reasons about whether it should have — against policy, regulation (EU AI Act, FCA, PRA, SM&CR), and the organisation's own risk appetite — and can advise, elevate, or enforce accordingly. We are early and moving fast: accepted into the FCA Digital Sandbox, with design guidance underway from major regulated enterprises. We have already built a working enterprise MVP and are actively working alongside design partners to solve real AI governance problems in regulated industries. Rather than building in isolation, every major capability is being shaped through customer collaboration and feedback. Our platform combines modern AI engineering with enterprise-grade architecture, including AWS Bedrock, Mistral, knowledge graphs and policy reasoning. We are building EU Sovereign Governance Intelligence for use by boards and risk committees.

Our Values

Customer-Employee Flywheel

Customer success energises our people, and energised people create great customer outcomes.

Build for the Long Term

We are enabling intelligence that regulated enterprises will trust for decades, and we make decisions we will be proud of in years to come.

Think Like Owners

Everyone holds equity, and everyone acts like it. We take responsibility beyond our job descriptions.

Lifelong Learning

We learn continuously from customers, regulators, research, and each other. We hire people who are curious by default.

Sustainable Growth

We grow at a pace we can sustain. Burnout is not a measure of success.

We are aware technology advancements can impact people and the environment, and we focus on strategies to minimise that impact.

About the Role

This is a true founding engineer role, working directly with the founder/CEO to take AISSURED from validated MVP to production platform.

You'll own and scale the core technology platform: our canonical governance event schema, the adapter layer that connects to agent frameworks and enterprise systems, the policy reasoning engine, and the multi-tenant sovereign AWS infrastructure it all runs on. The MVP is built and validated and the foundations are in place. Your job is to turn a validated MVP into an enterprise-grade platform that can scale across customers, regulations and AI ecosystems. You will also leverage the FCA’s Digital Sandbox to integrate data sources and enhance the platform.

As a founding engineer, you'll make product decisions, sit in on design-partner calls, and shape both the codebase and the engineering culture that everyone in the organisation inherits.

Responsibilities

• Co-create and shape the product roadmap working directly with the CEO, mentors, advisors and early adopters
• Design, build, and ship the core AISSURED platform: governance event ingestion, the reasoning/verdict engine, and the adapter layer
• Implement and harden our operating modes — advisory, escalation, and enforcement — so customers can adopt governance progressively
• Build LLM-powered evaluation pipelines (prompting, evals, guardrails) that produce consistent, explainable verdicts
• Own the AWS multi-account, multi-tenant architecture: security, tenant isolation, reliability, and cost
• Harden the code base from an architecture, network and security perspective and implement AI best practices to optimise resources
• Work directly with design partners: scope pilots, debug in their environments, turn feedback into roadmap
• Design pragmatic solutions that balance engineering excellence with customer delivery timelines.
• Establish engineering foundations — CI/CD, security vulnerability tracking and remediation, testing, observability, documentation — that scale with the team
• As a founding engineer, you'll have the opportunity to shape not only the product but also the engineering organisation, technical standards and hiring as the company grows.

You Are a Good Fit If

• You've shipped production systems end-to-end and are comfortable owning everything from infrastructure to API design to the last mile of UX
• You've worked hands-on with LLMs — building agents, evaluation harnesses, or LLM-backed products — and you understand their failure modes, not just their demos
• You're energised by ambiguity: you'd rather make a good decision today than wait for a perfect spec
• You care about why systems behave the way they do — the reasoning and auditability problems at the heart of AISSURED genuinely interest you
• You've worked in regulated environments (financial services, utilities, healthcare), or you're keen to learn what "audit-ready" really demands of software
• You want the founding-team trade: high ownership, high ambiguity, meaningful equity, and a direct line from your work to company outcomes

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrable experience

Experience

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant backend/distributed systems work
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred) and infrastructure-as-code
• Ability to translate customer and regulatory requirements into durable platform capabilities without overfitting the architecture to a single customer.
• Hands‑on experience building with LLM APIs (Claude Code, Codex or similar) in a shipped product or serious project
• At least one role in a startup or small team where you owned systems end-to-end

Location

• UK-based (remote-first with regular customer and team collaboration in London).
• Right to work in the UK