Founding Product Engineer

Founding Product Engineer (AI)

Salary: £120,000 to £170,000 + meaningful equity

Location: London - 5 days onsite

Visa sponsorship available

About the company

Our client is a well-funded, AI-native consumer startup building a proactive, conversational product that helps high-performing individuals manage key parts of their personal lives. The product is used daily by a demanding, high-value customer base, and early engagement and retention metrics are well ahead of industry benchmarks.

The business is backed by tier-1 investors and experienced operators, and is led by a founding team with previous startup successes and exits in consumer tech and conversational AI. They are now growing the founding engineering team as they scale the product and customer base.

The role

This is a hybrid role that sits between engineering and product. You’ll be hands-on technically while also acting as product owner for specific features: defining problems, shaping solutions, working directly with internal domain experts and stakeholders, and making sure what ships delivers real value to customers.

You’ll work closely with the CTO, founders, backend and mobile engineers, and the operations team. Many of the most important features sit at the intersection of product judgement and agent orchestration, and this role owns that intersection.

It’s a high-ownership role. You’ll take ambiguous ideas, turn them into concrete systems, ship them to production and iterate based on real usage. Over time it can grow into senior product leadership, technical leadership or a hybrid path, depending on your strengths. It’s well suited to someone who wants to build their own company one day.

What you’ll do

• Own product features end to end, from problem definition through to production, feedback and iteration
• Act as product owner for assigned areas, balancing customer needs, technical constraints and delivery speed
• Design and build AI-powered workflows using LLMs, tools and agentic systems
• Design agent flows that combine automation with human-in-the-loop escalation
• Work with internal domain experts to understand operational pain points and opportunities for leverage
• Collaborate with engineers to ship reliable, scalable implementations
• Define success metrics and use qualitative and quantitative feedback to guide iteration
• Debug production issues related to AI behaviour, data quality or workflow design
• Contribute code across the stack where needed, with a bias towards shipping

What they’re looking for

Experience

• 4+ years building production software
• Proven experience shipping AI-powered features to real customers, ideally at scale
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, prompt design, tool calling and agentic flows

Technical foundation

• Comfortable writing production-ready Python
• Solid understanding of backend systems and APIs
• Experience with data pipelines, embeddings, retrieval or RAG-style systems
• Able to reason about latency, cost, reliability and quality trade-offs

Product mindset

• Thinks in terms of user outcomes, not just implementation
• Comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information
• Defines the right problem before jumping to solutions
• Makes pragmatic decisions and adjusts quickly based on feedback

Collaboration

• Strong communicator across engineering, product and operations
• Takes ownership and is accountable for results
• Enjoys being close to customers and real usage
• Wants to work in person with a high-performing team

Nice to have

• Experience as a product owner or tech lead on specific features
• Django or similar backend frameworks
• Human-in-the-loop systems or operational tooling
• Understanding of mobile or frontend constraints
• Exposure to regulated or high-trust environments

Benefits

• Annual tech and education budget
• Wellness and health-tracking perks
• Comprehensive health cover, including dental and vision
• Lifestyle perks, events and access opportunities
• Team dinners and evening transport
• Flexible remote days