Understanding Recruitment
Software Engineer
Requirements
Seeking exceptional early-career engineers with a strong academic record from top universities and experience in competitive programming or elite internships. Candidates must demonstrate high agency, technical proficiency in Rust or TypeScript, and a passion for solving complex AI and software problems.
Job Description
Are you a recent graduate or early-career engineer with an exceptional technical track record?
Have you studied at a top university, completed internships at leading technology or trading firms, or competed at the highest levels of programming and mathematics?
🚀 Software Engineer – AI x Financial Modelling 🚀
💰 Salary: Up to £130k DOE + equity
📍 Location: London - onsite 5 days per week
🌍 Will relocate and sponsor
🎓 Experience: Exceptional engineers 0-2 years
I’m excited to be working with a very ambitious AI startup reinventing how businesses make some of their biggest decisions. They’re building an AI-native financial modelling platform – essentially Cursor for financial modelling in Excel.
Financial modelling underpins some of the world’s biggest decisions across M&A, private equity, investment, corporate strategy and consulting, yet the tooling remains incredibly manual and outdated.
This team is building something fundamentally different.
They’re now looking for exceptional graduate and early-career Software Engineers to join a small, elite engineering team and work directly on some genuinely difficult technical problems across AI, software performance, financial modelling and product engineering.
This is not a traditional graduate role. You’ll be given significant responsibility from day one, working alongside engineers from some of the strongest technical environments in the industry.
🎓 They’re particularly interested in candidates who have:
- Graduated from a top university with an exceptional academic record
- Completed internships at leading technology, trading, quantitative or engineering companies
- Demonstrated exceptional problem-solving and programming ability
- Participated in and ideally placed highly in competitive programming contests, Olympiads or similar competitions
- Built impressive technical projects outside of university or internships
- A genuine passion for software engineering and solving difficult problems
- The ability to learn incredibly quickly and operate with high autonomy
💡 You’ll work directly on:
- Building and shipping production software across the stack
- Owning features end-to-end, from backend services through to frontend
- Using AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor to dramatically accelerate development
- Building and improving AI agents, their tools, harnesses and context optimisation
- Writing high-performance software and tackling challenging optimisation problems
- Working with TypeScript and Rust across a rapidly evolving product
- Debugging low-level issues and improving backend infrastructure and CI
- Collaborating closely with design to build polished, intuitive product experiences
- Taking increasing ownership as you develop into a technical leader
🏆 Strong signals could include:
- Competitive programming / ICPC experience
- Mathematics, Computer Science or another highly technical degree
- Olympiad participation or success
- Internships at elite technology, trading or quantitative firms
- Experience with Rust, TypeScript, React or AI agents
- Personal projects that demonstrate exceptional technical ability
- Experience working with LLMs and modern AI coding tools
💻 Tech stack:
- Rust
- TypeScript
- React
- AI / LLM tooling
- Backend infrastructure & DevOps
🔎 What they’re looking for:
- Exceptional technical ability – you’re among the strongest engineers in your peer group
- High agency – you don’t wait to be told what to do; you figure things out and take ownership
- Intellectual curiosity – you love learning difficult concepts and getting to the bottom of complex problems
- AI-native mindset – you’re excited about using the latest models and tools to become a dramatically more effective engineer
- Speed + quality – you can move quickly without compromising engineering standards
- Competitive mindset – you enjoy challenging yourself and solving problems others find difficult
- Long-term potential – you want to grow rapidly and eventually own significant parts of a product
🚀 Why join?
- Join a tiny, exceptionally strong engineering team with backgrounds including Jane Street, Bloomberg, Cambridge and UCL
- Work alongside engineers who have competed at the highest levels of programming
- Get genuine ownership from the very beginning of your career
- Work at the cutting edge of AI-native software development
- Solve technically challenging problems across AI, Rust, TypeScript and high-performance systems
- Learn at an incredible pace alongside some of the best engineers around
- Opportunity to grow rapidly into a technical leader
- Help build a completely new category of AI product from the ground up
If you’re an exceptional graduate who wants to skip the traditional corporate graduate scheme and go straight into building ambitious, technically difficult products alongside an elite engineering team, this could be an incredible opportunity.
If you’ve got the academic results, competitive programming background, elite internships or technical projects to prove you’re exceptional, I’d love to hear from you.
Sound like you? Apply now 🚀
Education
Skills
About Understanding Recruitment
The Understanding Recruitment Universe Understanding Recruitment is the go-to destination for technology recruitment with headquarters in St. Albans, England. Specialising in Biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and Web3, our team of over 90 recruiters is adept in navigating the dynamic landscapes of Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust, Golang, .NET, DevOps, Product Management, and other tech roles within the Software Development Lifecycle. As your total talent solution partner, we seamlessly connect organisations with top-tier talent and empower tech professionals to discover their perfect fit within the ever-evolving tech industry. We offer unparalleled matches and comprehensive support across the UK, Europe, and the USA. In 2023, Understanding Recruitment became a 60% employee-owned company. This exciting development empowers our dedicated team to share in the financial rewards of our ongoing success. In the same year, we were recognised in Recruiter's annual FAST 50 listing, as the No.1 fastest-growing privately-owned recruitment business in the UK. Our in-house training programme also won a prestigious Princess Royal Training Award that is awarded to employers in the UK and Ireland who can prove that their outstanding training and skills development programmes have resulted in exceptional benefits for their business. With over a decade of success, 2022 marked the year we secured the much coveted Best Companies 3-star accreditation with a remarkable BCI score of 738 or higher, signifying 'world-class' workplace engagement. We've also been honoured as the 'Best Staffing Firm to Work For' for three consecutive years (2016-2018), and were named 'Business of the Year' at the 2017 SME Hertfordshire Business Awards.