Founding Engineer | Applied AI Start Up

Oho Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 145,000 - 196,000; Full time

Job summary

Oho Group in London is seeking a Senior/Principal Backend Engineer to join a fast-growing AI startup building agentic systems. You’ll design and own backend architecture, scale production systems, and ship Python-powered AI tooling that can reason with real-world data.

This early-stage role offers hands-on ownership, a compact team, and the chance to shape the platform from day one. Expect competitive salary (£170,000) plus up to 1% equity and a hybrid London work pattern with significant impact

Qualifications

• 5+ years' experience as a Senior/Principal Backend Engineer.
• Strong Python experience.
• Experience designing and operating production systems at scale.
• Experience building LLM/AI or agentic systems in production.
• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment with a high degree of ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own major parts of the platform's backend architecture and influence engineering culture.
• Build AI agents from the ground up and design systems that reason and use tools.
• Address frontier technical problems like agentic architecture, geospatial handling, scalability and reliability.

Skills

Python

Production systems at scale

LLM/AI/agentic systems

Geospatial data

Backend architecture

Tools

GCP

Postgres

TypeScript

Job description

London | Hybrid | Competitive Salary (£170,000)+ Up to 1% Equity

I’m working with an early-stage AI startup transforming how the physical world is designed and built.

They’re applying AI agents to a huge, traditionally slow-moving industry - automating complex research, analysis, calculations and workflows that currently take engineers weeks.

• Critical early hire — you’ll own major parts of the platform and have genuine influence over architecture and engineering culture.
• Build AI agents from the ground up — designing systems that can reason, use tools and work with complex real-world data.
• Frontier technical problems — agentic architecture, geospatial data, scalability, reliability and AI infrastructure.
• Seriously impressive founding team with backgrounds across frontier AI, engineering, product and high-scale systems.
• Huge market opportunity — applying AI to an industry with enormous infrastructure spend and significant room for automation.
• Real traction already — the product is being used with major engineering organisations and delivering significant time savings.
• Small, high-calibre team — high autonomy, high standards and the chance to make a meaningful impact from day one.

What they're looking for

• 5+ years' experience as a Senior/Principal Backend Engineer.
• Strong Python experience and solid systems/backend engineering fundamentals.
• Experience designing and operating production systems at scale.
• Experience building LLM, AI or agentic systems in production.
• Comfortable working in an early-stage environment with a high degree of ownership.
• Experience with GCP, Postgres, TypeScript or geospatial data is a bonus.

If you’re a strong backend engineer who wants to be very early in an ambitious AI company and work on problems that don't have established playbooks, this is worth a conversation.