Founding Product Engineer

Albert Bow; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Albert Bow in the United Kingdom seeks a Founding Product Engineer to own features end-to-end, from idea through production, with close collaboration to the CTO and founding team.

You will design AI-powered workflows using LLMs, tool calls and agentic systems, shaping product direction and working with backend and mobile engineers to ship reliable, scalable features in an early-stage, well-funded environment.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of production software experience.
• Experience building AI-powered features used by customers.
• Strong experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, tool calling and agentic workflows.
• Production-quality Python and backend system knowledge.
• Latency, cost, reliability trade-offs understood.

Responsibilities

• Own product features end to end from idea to production and iteration.
• Design AI-powered workflows using LLMs, tool calling and agentic systems.
• Develop agent workflows blending automation with human-in-the-loop processes.
• Take ownership of product areas and decide functionality and usability.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to improve processes and opportunities.
• Work with backend and mobile engineers to deliver reliable, scalable features.
• Define success metrics and use feedback to guide development.
• Get hands-on across the stack to ship features.

Skills

Product mindset

Ownership of features

Independent working

Strong communication

Tools

Django

Job description

I'm working with an early-stage, well-funded technology business looking to bring a Founding Product Engineer into its growing engineering team.

This is a particularly interesting opportunity for someone who enjoys working across engineering and product, wants genuine ownership over what they build, and is excited by the opportunity to work closely with a CTO and founding team.

They're looking for someone who can take an idea from initial problem definition through to production, combining strong engineering ability with good product judgement.

The Opportunity

This isn't a traditional software engineering position where you'll simply be picking up tickets and working through an existing roadmap.

You'll have ownership of specific product areas, helping decide what needs to be built, how it should work and how best to deliver it.

A big part of the role will involve building AI-powered features, designing agentic workflows and working with LLMs to develop production-ready functionality.

You'll work directly with the CTO, founders and wider engineering team, with plenty of scope to influence technical decisions and the direction of the product.

It's an early-stage environment, so you'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, getting stuck into different areas of the codebase and taking responsibility for getting things over the line.

What you’ll be doing:

• Owning product features end to end, from initial idea and problem definition through to production and iteration.
• Designing and building AI-powered workflows using LLMs, tool calling and agentic systems.
• Developing agent workflows that combine automation with human-in-the-loop processes.
• Taking ownership of specific product areas and making decisions around functionality, usability and implementation.
• Working closely with internal stakeholders to understand challenges and identify opportunities to improve existing processes.
• Collaborating with backend and mobile engineers to deliver reliable, scalable features.
• Defining success metrics and using customer feedback and product usage to influence future development.
• Getting hands-on across the stack wherever needed to get things built and shipped.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years' experience building and shipping production software.
• Previous experience building AI-powered features that have been used by real customers.
• Strong experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, tool calling and agentic workflows.
• Comfortable writing production-quality Python.
• Good understanding of backend systems, APIs and application architecture.
• Experience with data pipelines, embeddings, retrieval or RAG-based systems.
• An understanding of the trade-offs between latency, cost, reliability and output quality.

The Person

The most important thing is that you've built and shipped AI-powered functionality before. They're not looking for someone who has simply experimented with LLMs or built a few prototypes.

You'll need to be someone who thinks beyond the technical implementation and understands the problem you're trying to solve.

Ideally, you’ll have:

• A strong product mindset and the ability to challenge how something should be built.
• Experience taking ownership of features or product areas.
• The ability to operate independently without needing everything clearly defined.
• A pragmatic approach to engineering, balancing speed of delivery with quality.
• Strong communication skills and the confidence to work directly with founders, engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• A genuine interest in building products and seeing how people use what you've created.

Nice to Have

• Experience operating as a Product Engineer, Technical Lead or Staff Engineer
• Familiarity with Django or similar backend frameworks.
• Experience building human-in-the-loop systems or operational tooling.
• Some understanding of frontend or mobile engineering.
• Experience working in regulated or high-trust environments.

If you are interested in learning more about this role, speak to Christian at Albert Bow for more information.