Founding Software Engineer (ML + Payments)

Few&Far; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 84,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful Equity

Job summary

Few&Far in London is seeking a founding engineer to build the platform end-to-end, covering backend ML, risk modeling, and payment orchestration. You will work closely with the founders on uncharted territory, crafting production systems that scale and align with the product vision.

You’ll ship fast, make disciplined trade-offs, and bring a calm, craftsman-like approach to complex problems in a hybrid London setting. Equity opportunities accompany a high-impact role.

Qualifications

• Shipped production software end-to-end.
• Deep experience in ML infra or payments (ideally both).
• Make sharp calls on imperfect information; know when to over-engineer vs ship.

Responsibilities

• Build the risk model to quantify alignment risk, moving from spreadsheets to a real engine.
• Develop payment flows and integrate with partner systems, often building flows from scratch.
• Ship end-to-end software with the founders, maintaining high craftsmanship and fast iteration.

Job description

Hybrid in London Office

Up to £140k + Meaningful Equity

They're building the trust layer for agentic commerce (yes, they know "agentic" is doing a lot of work right now, bear with them).

Here's the pitch: soon, commerce will be agent-led. You tell an agent what you want, it goes and buys it. Autonomously. No shopper is going to hand over their card details to a robot unless they're sure it'll buy the right thing - the right size nappies, not the ones your baby outgrew three months ago. That's not fraud, that's not a hack, it's a totally new risk category they call "alignment risk." And right now, nobody has solved it. They're building the buyer-protection layer and risk engine to fix that.

What you'll actually build:

• The risk model - go from bootstrapped spreadsheets to an actual risk engine that can quantify "alignment risk" using whatever mix of supervised learning, LLM-as-judge, and other tricks gets you there. Nothing like this exists yet, so you're not implementing a known playbook, you're writing it.
• The payment flows - build on the newest agentic commerce protocols so the risk layer plugs into real payment flows, sometimes building those flows from scratch alongside partners. Uncharted territory, bleeding-edge tech, straight to production. What could go wrong.

What they need:

A founding engineer who'll build the whole thing end-to-end with the founders Backend ML, payment orchestration, the lot.

• You've shipped production software end-to-end. Bonus points the closer it was to an actual 0-to-1 story.
• You've got real depth in ML infra or payments (ideally both, but they'll take one).
• You make sharp calls on imperfect information - you know when to over-engineer and when to duct-tape it and ship.
• High agency, low ego.

You're the kind of person who:

• Cares (maybe too much) about craftsmanship.
• Gets genuinely curious about users, new tech, weird ways of building things.
• Has taste - you think about the UX implications of your choices, and you're partial to calm tech over chaos.
• Ships fast, iterates faster, and doesn't get precious about it.
• Brings good energy - robust debate, healthy appetite for silliness.