Founding Engineer - Vertical Ai

Story Terrace Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Share options from day one

London office or UK remote

Influence over product and engineering

Job summary

Shipio is seeking a founding engineer to sharpen its vertical AI in London or UK remote work with regular days in London. You’ll own the AI end-to-end—from data it learns from to architecture, training, calibration and evaluation—shipping features from idea to release and delivering value for customers.

Join the first two engineers and shape the core product, the architecture, and how future engineers are hired.

Qualifications

• Experience building and shipping models on highly variable real-world data.
• Strong engineering mindset with numerical rigor.
• Owns model architecture and calibration end-to-end.
• Based in the UK, able to spend regular days in London.

Responsibilities

• Turn product strategy into a roadmap for the vertical AI.
• Improve how the system models cause and consequence in complex operations.
• Run the model lifecycle: data curation, anomaly detection, training, calibration, evaluation.
• Own the architecture of the vertical AI and its integration with the pricing engine.
• Maintain tests and evaluations to ensure pricing accuracy.
• Shape the agentic pipeline with new agents and faster loops.

Skills

End-to-end ownership

Agentic AI

Engineering mindset

Product sense

UK presence

Job description

Founding Engineer, Vertical AI

Shipio

Location: London or UK remote, with regular days together in London

Package: Competitive salary plus meaningful share options from day one

Why Shipio

How do you price moving a hospital's MRI scanner, a wind farm's gearbox, a lab full of delicate instruments or a high-value sculpture? Twenty-five years ago, getting an instant price for a parcel was hard. Now it barely registers at checkout. Shipio is building the infrastructure that does the same for complex goods, so including the logistics price in the sale of a turbine blade becomes as simple as adding postage to a T-shirt.

Today every one of those prices rests on dozens of judgement calls about handling, equipment, packing, routing, customs and timing. A specialist operator with years of experience pieces each quote together in spreadsheets and email, and a complex quote can take days. Shipio handles all of that variety inside one system: a vertical AI that reasons through each job, a deterministic pricing engine that produces the price, and a payments rail that settles the transaction. Pricing appears wherever customers want to buy, and for logistics companies quoting stops being the bottleneck and starts driving growth.

It's already in customers' hands. Design partners have been using the product for around six months, and we're backed by Fuel Ventures. Our customers are specialist logistics companies, usually between 20 and 200 people, in a market worth around £1.2 trillion that still runs largely on email and spreadsheets. Shipio earns a fee on the transactions that run through it.

Our founder, Hugo, is an engineer by background and designed both the pricing algorithm and the vertical AI. Before Shipio he founded a tech-enabled specialist freight forwarder in fine art, which is where he saw the problem first-hand. You'd be one of the first two engineers, building the core team alongside him, with real ownership from your first week, share options in what you build, and work that goes straight into live quotes for customers.

The role

You make Shipio's vertical AI sharper with every supplier that joins. It already reasons like a senior specialist operator: it understands why each decision on a job is made and makes those calls itself, including on jobs it has never seen. You own it end to end, from the data it learns from through to its architecture, training, calibration and evaluation, working on some of the hardest data in any industry: large, unreliable and endlessly varied. You take features from idea to release yourself, generating the idea, planning the product, designing it, building it and shipping it, and you're accountable for the value it creates for customers. It's a role for an engineer who wants full ownership of complex delivery and wants to push an agentic way of building further.

What you'll do

• Work with Hugo to learn the domain and turn the product strategy into a roadmap for the vertical AI.
• Improve how the system models cause and consequence in complex, real-world physical operations: why an operator chose one strategy over another, so it reasons its way to the right answer on unfamiliar jobs.
• Run the model lifecycle as one continuous process: data curation, anomaly detection, training and calibration, evaluation, generalisation and feedback loops.
• Own the architecture of the vertical AI and how it works with the deterministic pricing engine.
• Maintain the tests and evaluation that prove the output is right, because prices and payments depend on it.
• Shape the agentic pipeline the whole team builds with: new agents, sharper checks and faster loops.

What you'll bring

• Models you have built and shipped on highly variable, messy real-world data.
• A strong engineering mindset and a good head for numbers.
• End-to-end ownership of model architecture and calibration, rather than one stage of it.
• An agentic way of building. You read code closely and understand architecture properly, while much of the day-to-day build runs through AI agents.
• Product sense: you generate the ideas and plan the product as well as build it.
• Based in the UK and able to spend regular days in London.

Nice to have

Specialist logistics experience from the inside; logistics tech, freight or pricing systems; anomaly detection on operational data; working across models from more than one provider; early-stage start-up experience.

What we offer

• Share options: Meaningful share options from day one
• Working pattern: London office or UK remote, with regular days together in London
• Influence: A seat at the table, shaping the product, the architecture and how the next engineers are hired
• Start date: We're happy to work around notice periods for the right person

How we hire

We keep it short, every step shows you how we work, and we'll tell you where you stand at each one.

1. A 30-minute conversation with our talent partner. It's recorded, so you only tell your story once.
2. A conversation with Hugo, our founder: hear where Shipio is going and pressure-test it.
3. A paid live build using your own AI tools on a real slice of the problem, then a review together. You'll see how we work, and we'll see how you think.
4. References, then an offer.