Founding Engineer, Agent Systems

C&D Talent Advisory

St Albans

On-site

GBP 130,000 - 170,000

Full time

2 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

EMI-eligible equity

Office in King's Cross

On-site facilities

Team lunch

Specialty coffee

Job summary

C&D Talent Advisory seeks a Founding Engineer for our London seed-stage startup. You will own the agent orchestration platform and design multi-step agent workflows powering customer-facing AI features.

You’ll build secure sandboxing, evaluation frameworks, and reliability layers around frontier LLMs to production-ready systems with high autonomy. You’ll work from our King's Cross office on-site with strong ownership, shaping engineering standards and taking features end-to-end from concept to

Qualifications

Strong professional backend engineering experience.
1-2+ years of experience shipping production LLM-powered features.
Strong TypeScript or Node.js experience.
Experience building customer-facing production AI systems.
Hands-on experience with agent frameworks.
Experience with tool calling and multi-step orchestration.
Production experience building AI evaluations.
Experience with dataset curation and regression testing.
Understanding of LLM-as-judge approaches and failure modes.
Strong systems-thinking ability.
Experience with asynchronous systems and queues.
Understanding of idempotency and reliability patterns.
Strong product-engineering mindset.
Ability to own features from customer problem through production deployment.
High level of autonomy and accountability.

Responsibilities

Build and evolve the core agent orchestration platform.
Design multi-step agent workflows and tool-calling systems.
Build context-management and agent-scaffolding infrastructure.
Develop secure sandboxing for agent execution.
Implement prompt-injection defenses and other agent-security controls.
Build production evaluation frameworks for fuzzy, high-stakes outputs.
Curate evaluation datasets and regression suites.
Design and improve LLM-as-judge systems.
Evaluate model performance across upgrades and provider changes.
Build retries, fallbacks, and circuit-breaker mechanisms.
Own prompt versioning and AI-quality infrastructure.
Design systems around async processing, queues, and idempotency.
Define the internal standard for production AI quality.
Own AI reliability and make ship/no-ship decisions when necessary.

Skills

Backend engineering

LLM production

TypeScript/Node.js

Customer-facing AI

Agent frameworks

Tool calling

Orchestration

Evaluation infra

Dataset curation

Async systems

Tools

Docker

Terraform

Postgres

GitHub Actions

Azure

Anthropic APIs

OpenAI APIs

Claude Code

Job description

Founding Engineer, Agent Systems | London

Location: King's Cross, London
Work model: On-site by default, with some flexibility
Employment: Full-time
Level: Mid-Senior / Founding Engineer
Experience: Typically 6-7+ years, with flexibility for exceptional AI-native profiles
Estimated compensation: £130,000-£170,000+Equity
Industry: Enterprise AI / Agent Systems
Environment: Seed-stage, high-growth startup

About the opportunity

Join a seed-stage company building AI-native risk infrastructure for regulated enterprises
Work on production AI systems used across financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare
Own the agent platform powering customer-facing AI features
Build the orchestration, evaluation, and reliability layers around frontier LLMs
Turn model capabilities into production systems that domain experts can trust
Set engineering standards for when AI features are reliable enough to ship
Operate with founding-team levels of ownership and technical influence
Work in a company already generating seven-figure revenue through multi-year enterprise contracts

What you'll own

Build and evolve the core agent orchestration platform
Design multi-step agent workflows and tool-calling systems
Build context-management and agent-scaffolding infrastructure
Develop secure sandboxing for agent execution
Implement prompt-injection defenses and other agent-security controls
Build production evaluation frameworks for fuzzy, high-stakes outputs
Curate evaluation datasets and regression suites
Design and improve LLM-as-judge systems
Evaluate model performance across upgrades and provider changes
Build retries, fallbacks, and circuit-breaker mechanisms
Own prompt versioning and AI-quality infrastructure
Design systems around async processing, queues, and idempotency
Define the internal standard for production AI quality
Own AI reliability and make ship/no-ship decisions when necessary

What we're looking for

Strong professional backend engineering experience
1-2+ years of experience shipping production LLM-powered features
Strong TypeScript or Node.js experience
Experience building customer-facing production AI systems
Hands‑on experience with agent frameworks
Experience with tool calling and multi‑step orchestration
Production experience building AI evaluations
Experience with dataset curation and regression testing
Understanding of LLM-as-judge approaches and failure modes
Strong systems‑thinking ability
Experience with asynchronous systems and queues
Understanding of idempotency and reliability patterns
Strong product‑engineering mindset
Ability to own features from customer problem through production deployment
High level of autonomy and accountability
Based in London or able to commute regularly for an on‑site‑first role

Particularly valuable experience

Anthropic APIs
OpenAI APIs
Open-weight models
Production LLM workloads at scale
Agent orchestration frameworks
AI evaluation infrastructure
Model fallback architecture
Prompt versioning
Prompt-injection defense
Agent security
Sandboxed tool execution
Production RAG systems
High-stakes AI applications
Compliance
Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)
Audit technology
Cybersecurity
Financial services
Regulated enterprise software

Strong profile signals

Former founder or technical founder
Former CTO returning to hands‑on engineering
Founding or early‑stage engineering experience
Experience at a high‑growth product company
Experience at a leading technology or AI organization
Significant independent AI projects or side projects
Strong evidence of product ownership
History of shipping customer‑facing systems end‑to‑end
AI‑native development workflow
Heavy use of coding agents such as Claude Code or equivalent
Ability to move between product, backend, AI systems, and reliability work
Strong technical judgment rather than purely research‑oriented expertise

This role may not be the right fit if you

Have exclusively front‑end or front‑end‑first engineering experience
Have a purely AI research background without production software engineering ownership
Have worked primarily in Developer Relations or Developer Experience
Have only built internal AI tools rather than customer‑facing production systems
Lack meaningful backend engineering experience
Have AI experience limited to prototypes or demos
Prefer research over shipping production products
Lack experience taking ownership of production reliability
Prefer narrowly scoped engineering responsibilities
Are uncomfortable making judgment calls around AI quality and production readiness
Are not comfortable working primarily on‑site in London

Technical environment