Founding Optimisation Engineer

Dayjobai, Inc; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Significant equity

25 days holiday + birthday off

Moorgate office

Learning & development budget

Founding team opportunity

Job summary

DayJob.AI in London is seeking a Founding Optimisation Engineer to own the end-to-end development of our optimisation engine. You will design, build and deploy models that cut costs and improve throughput for real-world logistics.

You will work with the founding team to define the technical roadmap, mentor engineers, and scale a product that operates in a fast-paced startup. Strong Python, SQL and solver experience are essential, as is a track record with deployed systems in transport or

Qualifications

• A degree in mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, or a similar quantitative field.
• 4+ years working on optimisation, routing, scheduling, or applied OR on deployed systems.
• A track record of building and shipping optimisation or ML solutions in transport or logistics.
• Experience with geospatial data, graph theory and computational geometry.
• Strong Python and SQL, with hands-on experience using solvers such as OR-Tools, Gurobi or CPLEX.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end model design, build, deployment and tuning from idea to production.
• Define and implement the technical roadmap for the optimisation engine.
• Collaborate with the founding team to scale the product in the logistics domain.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to platform architecture.

Skills

Python

SQL

Geospatial data

End-to-end model ownership

Mentoring / Leadership

Education

Mathematics / Physics / CS / Engineering degree

Tools

OR-Tools

Gurobi

CPLEX

Job description

Founding Optimisation Engineer

London, Moorgate · Full-time · On-site or in Office (4 days/week) · Data Science & Operations Research · Dayjob.AI · YC P26

About DayJob

DayJob builds AI agents for short-haul trucking - a $45bn market still run on spreadsheets, phone calls and software from the 1990s.

We've just completed Y Combinator, are scaling towards $1M ARR, growing ~20% month-on-month, and launching in the US. Our customers include some of the largest waste and recycling operators in the UK and US, and we're backed by leading investors including Paul Graham (Founder of Y Combinator) and Harry Stebbings (Founder of 20VC).

Dayjob has developed its own proprietary models, which wouldn’t have been possible until now, delivering hundreds of thousands of pounds in additional revenue to its customers. This is a once in a generation opportunity to change how these businesses operate, industries where software adoption has been slow but where AI adoption can completely change their economics.

About the Optimisation Team

Deploying state-of-the-art algorithms into legacy businesses is one way to think about what we do at Dayjob. Hence, optimisation is the cornerstone of what we do; saving 1% time on the road gives our customers hundreds of thousands more revenue and saves gallons of diesel on wasted mileage.

We’ve launched models to optimise roll-off vehicles in the waste sector; this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Founding Team

Fred & George met at the University of Oxford.

• George (CEO) was Head of Sales at Otta and launched Deliveroo’s Grocery division, scaling it to £100M GMV.

• Fred (CTO) builds products that optimise complex supply chains using AI and advanced analytics.

You may be a good fit if you have

• A degree in mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, or a similar quantitative field

• 4+ years working on optimisation, routing, scheduling, or applied OR problems - ideally with meaningful time on real, deployed systems

• A track record of building and shipping optimisation or ML solutions, ideally in a fast-paced transport or logistics setting

• Experience in working with geospatial data like spectral analysis, applied graph theory and computational geometry.

• Strong Python and SQL, with hands‑on experience using solvers (e.g. OR-Tools, Gurobi, CPLEX)

• The ability to balance theoretical rigour with pragmatic constraints, and to own a model end-to-end: design - build - deploy - tune

• Comfort working with messy operational data and edge‑case-heavy workflows

• Experience mentoring or leading other engineers, or a clear and genuine ambition to start

Bonus if you’ve worked on

• Vehicle routing problems (VRP), especially with uncertainty and problem sizes requiring decomposition

• Constraint programming or metaheuristics

• Real-time decision systems

• Logistics, fleet, or field-service products

• Early‑stage startups

What we offer

• Competitive salary

• Significant equity

• 25 days holiday + your birthday off

• Moorgate office

• Learning & development budget

• A foundational role defining our optimisation engine and technical roadmap from the ground up

Application process

1. Intro call with the team (30 mins)

2. Technical interview (2 hrs)

3. Final chat with the founders (45 mins)

To close

Short-haul trucking is a decade behind companies like Amazon - yet it's the lifeblood of the economy. Our customers deserve better tools, and only now, with AI, are they possible to build. If you want to build the brains of the next-generation dispatch engine, we'd love to meet you.