Founding Engineer (Product)

Riplo; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Visa sponsorship

London office

Job summary

Riplo is seeking a Founding Product Engineer in London to shape the product DNA and join a small, ambitious team. You will report directly to the CTO and drive the architecture, product strategy, and early roadmap with significant ownership.

You will design multi-step agentic workflows, build with TypeScript/Next.js/React, and work closely with clients to deliver measurable value, equity upside, and a fast-paced startup environment.

Qualifications

• You can take a vague user pain point from a client and ship a functional prototype quickly.
• You value speed and iteration velocity in an early-stage startup.
• You are a T-shaped contributor comfortable across product, management, and frontend engineering.

Responsibilities

• Define the product DNA of the company and report to the CTO.
• Design multi-step agentic workflows beyond basic RAG to produce paid-for analyses.
• Make quality measurable with evals, harnesses, and review checks for agent outputs.
• Turn research and data into evidence-backed insights on final slides.
• Work directly with clients to build AI use cases inside organisations.

Skills

Product builder

Speed

T-Shaped

Tools

TypeScript

Next.js

React

Tailwind

PostgreSQL

Redis

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Founding Product Engineer

London · £120K-£200K plus equity · Visa sponsorship available

The Mission

We are replacing the Management Consulting industry with software.

The $1 trillion consulting industry is powered by some of the world’s brightest minds, yet they remain trapped in manual, inefficient workflows: spreadsheet orchestration, slide-deck assembly, and fragmented data synthesis.

We proved it on ourselves first. Our advisory business serves six private equity funds across the UK, Europe and the US, and one Riplo consultant delivers an engagement that a tier-one firm staffs with a full team. The platform we built behind that work is now open to the world. Next, we are running the same playbook on a much bigger market: AI transformations for PE funds and the companies they own.

Our team comes from QuantumBlack/McKinsey, BCG, DeepMind, Hg Capital and KKR. Cherry Ventures, Blue Lion and the founders of QuantumBlack back us, with angels from OpenAI, McKinsey, BCG and Apple. We are nine people, and we are hiring one Founding Product Engineer.

The Challenge

As our Founding Product Engineer, your role is not just writing code. You will report directly to our CTO, and define the product DNA of the company. You will:

• Build Beyond the Chatbot: Design multi-step agentic workflows that move past simple RAG and produce analysis a PE fund pays for.

• Make Quality Measurable: Good enough for a partner is a hard standard to code against. Build the evals, harnesses and review checks that prove an agent's output meets it.

• Turn Evidence into Insight: Connect research, data and sources to the final page, so that every claim on a slide traces back to its evidence.

• Work Directly with Our Clients: Build AI use cases inside client organisations, alongside the people who use them. What you learn there shapes the core roadmap.

• Pioneer the Agentic SDLC: Agents write most of our code. Design the systems, steer the agents, and push our own way of building software forward with a very large token budget.

You Are a Fit If:

• You are a Product Builder: You might be a product engineer at a SaaS company, a product manager who now ships code, or a consultant building serious AI tooling on the side. We judge purely on the quality of what you have built. You don't need a 20-page PRD. You can take a vague user pain point from a client and ship a functional prototype by Friday.

• You value Speed: You believe that in an early-stage startup, iteration velocity is the only unfair advantage. You prefer shipping a 90% solution today over a perfect one next month.

• You are T-Shaped: You hold deep experience in one area (product management, management consulting, or front-end engineering), but are comfortable enough with the others to add value across the business.

Our Stack

• Product: TypeScript, Next.js, React, Tailwind

• Data and Infra: PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, Terraform

• Real-time: Collaboration over WebSockets

Why Join Us?

• Real Ownership: £120K to £200K base salary plus equity. You will own a piece of the company you are building, and you will own the product roadmap with the CTO.

• High Trust / Low Bureaucracy: We value clarity of thought and bias to action. No middle management, no pointless meetings, just building.

• The Practicalities: London-based, four days a week in the office, one flexible day, and client site time when projects require it. Visa sponsorship available.