Founding Engineer

Location:

London (2 days per week in Canary Wharf, hybrid) Compensation:

£70k-£80k + ~1-2% equity A fast-growing social community platform with over 125,000 organically acquired users is seeking its first in-house Founding Engineer. The company connects people through shared interests-sports, book clubs, and meetups-helping members build friendships both online and offline. With a clear roadmap to scale to one million users and beyond, the business is now ready to bring technical leadership in-house. The Founding Engineer will work closely with the founder and product lead to own technical execution, while also laying the foundations for future team growth. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the product and technical direction of a social platform that has already achieved impressive traction without paid acquisition. Skills/Experience Experience as a founding Engineer Write production-quality code across the stack, including Node.js, Express, GraphQL, TypeScript, React, and React Native. Deliver high-quality, responsive web and mobile apps, leveraging modern frameworks such as Vite, React Query, Context API, and CSS libraries. Integrate AI/ML APIs, LLM-driven features, and automation tooling into the product roadmap. Design and implement scalable, secure, and cloud-ready architectures to support rapid user growth. Translate product strategy into technical execution in close collaboration with the leadership team. Build technical processes and infrastructure to support a fast-growing user base, with experience scaling beyond one million users. Play a foundational role in growing the engineering team over time, including mentoring and hiring. Nice to Have Experience with orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph) and multi-agent workflows. Familiarity with vector databases, RAG pipelines, and lightweight model hosting. Ability to set up data pipelines and feedback loops for improving AI-driven features. Awareness of emerging areas such as multimodal AI, edge AI, and AI applications in DevOps/observability. The Ideal Candidate A hands-on engineer comfortable moving quickly in a start-up environment. Excited by the opportunity to take ownership as the first technical hire and grow into a senior leadership role. Strong communicator who can collaborate directly with product leadership. Previous experience scaling consumer-facing apps to millions of users. Motivated by the challenge of building meaningful technology that helps people connect in healthier, more authentic ways. Why Join Join at a pivotal stage, with the ability to shape the product and culture from the ground up. Be part of a team passionate about creating a new kind of social platform focused on real connections. Clear progression path into a senior engineering leadership role as the team grows.

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