Staff AI Apps Engineer - Remote, Founding Team Equity

Skillsearch; Greater London; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding-team equity

Remote work

Job summary

Skillsearch is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on AI-native productivity in a stealth startup. Fully remote with UK-based candidates preferred.

You will own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop, designing scalable systems to support AI-powered workflows from email to productivity suites. You will mentor senior engineers, shape APIs and abstractions, and make critical trade-offs on latency, reliability, and cost as you scale a proactive AI layer

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex, production systems.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals - built and shipped systems in production use.
• Experience building AI-enabled systems - orchestration, tool use, state, retries, and failure handling.
• Comfortable across backend and client platforms, with deep expertise in at least one.
• Strong technical judgement and ownership of outcomes with incomplete information.
• Zero-to-one experience – pre-launch engineering familiarity.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Design systems that handle AI-powered product complexity (state, orchestration, retries, fault tolerance).
• Build APIs and abstractions connecting AI capabilities to product experiences.
• Lead a small team of senior engineers through reviews and hands-on mentorship.
• Make trade-offs across latency, reliability, cost, security, and UX and ship.

Skills

Leadership

Backend engineering

Systems design

AI systems

Technical judgement

Tools

REST APIs

Design systems

Cloud platforms

Job description

Skillsearch is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on AI-native productivity in a stealth startup. Fully remote with UK-based candidates preferred.

You will own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop, designing scalable systems to support AI-powered workflows from email to productivity suites. You will mentor senior engineers, shape APIs and abstractions, and make critical trade-offs on latency, reliability, and cost as you scale a proactive AI layer