Senior Software Engineer - Backend (On-site)

ZipRecruiter; London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a leading stealth-mode AI laboratory as a Founding Engineer in London, where you will design and develop cutting-edge backend infrastructure for Machine Learning workloads. With a competitive salary and equity, this role offers significant autonomy, professional growth, and the chance to work at the forefront of AI research.

Benefits

28 days + public holidays allowance

Opportunities for professional growth and progression

Competitive salary and equity

Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience in back-end engineering.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Strong analytical problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop scalable, fault-tolerant systems.
• Lead projects and mentor colleagues.
• Contribute to best practices and company culture.

Skills

Cloud-architecting

Back-end development

Problem solving

Collaboration

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Docker

Postgres

GitHub Actions

Job description

Job Description

Team: Backend

Location: London (Liverpool Street)

Employment Type: Full-time and Permanent

Remuneration (London; On-site): £90–120k Base Salary + Discretionary Bonus + Equity

We are a stealth-mode AI laboratory researching and developing Machine Learning models.

The founding team consists of Cambridge graduates and former engineers at Microsoft, Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs. We are backed by prominent investors from the US and the UK, including institutional VC funds and C-level executives of global technology companies.

The role involves the design and development of backend infrastructure for Machine Learning workloads. You will be working closely with the Machine Learning team; however, you are not required or expected to have background in Machine Learning. This is an applied role, and we are looking to hire a software engineer with experience in cloud computing and distributed systems.

In this role, you will:

• Design and develop highly-scalable, fault tolerant and event driven systems.
• Lead projects from inception to launch and beyond, having a high degree of autonomy and ownership over your work.
• Work closely with the founding team and contribute towards best practices, standards, and culture of the company.
• Mentor your current colleagues, raising the bar for the company.
• Co-hire your future colleagues.

Our tech stack:

• We use and leverage AWS as much as possible and manage it with Terraform.
• Services are written in C# (.NET 9) and deployed to ECS or Lambda via GitHub Actions.
• We use Postgres, SNS/SQS and Redis.
• We have good end-to-end test coverage and are confident in our deployments.

What we are looking for:

• Back-end development: 5+ years of industry experience in back-end engineering, developing reliable and scalable systems with an object-oriented programming .
• Cloud- technologies: Experience in architecting and deploying in cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP or Azure), an understanding of containerisation (e.g., Docker), infrastructure-as-code software (e.g., Terraform), and observability platforms (e.g., Datadog or Grafana).
• Leadership: A track record of leading complex projects.
• Problem solving: Strong analytical problem-solving skills and attention to detail. You have the ability to break down complex projects into actionable tasks.
• Collaboration and communication: Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

We would like to acknowledge that almost no candidate checks every box – and that is perfectly fine. If you are passionate about solving complex challenges and open to learning new technologies, we would love to hear from you.

Nice to have:

• Machine Learning: Experience in generative models, LLMs, multi-modal models and Deep Learning more generally.
• Open-source: Contributions to and experience in open-source projects.
• Startup experience: Experience with a startup work environment and wider ecosystem.

Why join us?

• Work in an environment conducting cutting-edge research in AI.
• An official role title of “Founding Engineer” – make an impact on day one.
• Competitive salary, equity and benefits package.
• 28 days + public holidays allowance.
• Opportunities for professional growth and progression with your career.
• Work on challenging engineering problems that have a real impact on the industry.
• Work with high-profile customers and technology partners.