Founder Engineer, London, England, United Kingdom

Founder Engineer

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Disciple is a new AI platform allowing fans to connect with their favourite thought leaders. The vision is to create a world where everyone gets access to world class advice for a fraction of the cost by leveraging AI.

For fans this means a new way to connect with the minds that they admire in a radically personalised way. This gives them 1-to-1 access to leaders across business coaching, health strategies, relationship advice, spiritual guidance amongst others.

For the creators, Disciple is a chance to scale their practice shifting from 1-to-1 advice, to 1-to-many interactions. They can now make their expertise and insights available 24/7 to all, opening up a new monetization stream in the process.

We are a small team of founders with multiple exits under our belts and experience raising over £100m in funding. We are on the hunt for our first technical hire to help build Disciple from concept to scale . The goal will be to spin up an MVP to rapidly prove product market fit with the ultimate aim of raising a Series A.

Why Join

This is a chance to work with proven founders to launch a business at scale. You will have the chance to shape the business from inception and get experience in founding a company from people who have done it before.

On successful completion of Series A, you will have the chance to lead the technical side of the business as a founding team member.

The Role: Founding Engineer

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work side by side with the founders to reach product-market fit.

What you’ll do:

Ship fast: Design, build, and deploy core features end-to-end using React + Express.
Own features: Take new product ideas from sketch to production-ready and general availability.
Solve real pain: Expect tight product feedback loops — weekly, not quarterly.
Shape architecture: Make foundational decisions on scalability, performance, and system design.
Run experiments: This is a pre-PMF (product-market fit) role focused on learning and rapid iteration.
Build the culture: Help define engineering principles, processes, and eventually build your own team.

Where this role leads:

In 18–24 months, you may be leading a team — or the team forms around the product you’ve built.
You’ll own life-changing equity with Series A plans within 12 months.
You’ll become a true 0→1 builder — setting you up to be a future CTO, Engineering Leader, or founder.
You’ll never just “build what you’re told” — you’ll have product-level input from day one.

What You Bring

Backend experience with REST or GraphQL APIs (Express, NestJS, Django, or FastAPI)
Strong experience building with AI and/or Agentic systems
Experience working with LLM provider APIs, Langchain, ai-sdk or equivalent beneficial
Experience or understanding of RAG, fine-tuning and evals for LLMs beneficial
Database design experience (relational or document-based)
Clear written and verbal communication skills
High agency, autonomy, and a product-first mindset
Track record of building side projects or owning end-to-end features

Bonus Points For

Experience at early-stage startups or as a founder (success or failure — it all counts!)
Comfortable making trade-offs in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
Familiarity with test-driven development (TDD) and CI/CD workflows
Exposure to DevOps
Frontend design skills

How They Hire

The team assesses candidates on four core qualities:

Hunger: You want to work incredibly hard, move fast, and be rewarded accordingly. You may have worked at a hyper-growth company, or you can demonstrate this mindset through interviews or references.
Technical competence: Stellar interviews and reference checks.
Speed of execution: You ship code quickly and know where to make smart trade-offs to push features swiftly.
Signs of exceptionalism: You’ve demonstrated world-class ability — whether through academics, side projects, or other objectively impressive achievements.
React / Next.js frontend
NestJS / Express backend
MongoDB
SOC 2 Compliant

Location

Flexible hybrid approach

Interview Process

Intro chat — 15 min with founders (non-evaluative, virtual)
Initial stage — 45 min with founders (80% motivation, 20% technical, virtual)
Technical interview — Take-home task + system design (1 hr in person with technical consultant)
Strategy interview — 45 min with founders (in person)
Offer chat — 30 min with founders (virtual)

Seniority level

Seniority level
Entry level

Employment type

Employment type
Full-time