Founding Full Stack Engineer - Platform

Location : London, United Kingdom (Hybrid) Salary : Actually competitive. We want the top 0.1% and we’re willing to pay for it. Equity : Meaningful founding stake – Bench is building the Cursor for hardware design – starting with Robotics and Aerospace. This isn’t a job for everyone. We’re after the top 0.1% of mission-driven builders. More than anything, we care about hunger, passion for this problem space and your track record of exceptional achievement. We’re building a category-defining company from first principles. The kind of product that will reshape how engineering teams work – and a journey you’ll look back on as the most intense, creative, and career-defining chapter of your life. It’ll be hard. You’ll move fast, take ownership, and ship real things that matter – alongside a small team of obsessive builders who hold themselves to a high bar. If the above excites you, read on! – Bench – The Mission Building hardware is still painfully slow – repetitive workflows, disconnected tools, and endless manual iteration. We’re building the platform that changes that. Bench gives hardware engineers what software teams have had for years: a fast, flexible, AI-native stack that automates the boring parts and supercharges the creative ones. Bench is a collaborative, version-controlled system where AI agents help engineers plan, build, and run tools and workflows securely and at scale. We’re building it from first principles to support complex design, simulation, and iteration workflows across robotics, aerospace, and beyond. The mission is simple: make hardware development 10x faster – and unlock the next generation of physical innovation. This is a generational opportunity. We’re well funded, agile and shipping fast – and the engineers who join now will be able to truly shape our trajectory. The Role Focus: Designing and building the scalable backend infrastructure, integrations, and reliable execution environments required to support complex AI agent workflows. You’ll lead development on the core backend systems that power Bench, including secure execution environments, API integrations with external engineering tools (e.g. CAD/CAE), and the infrastructure that enables real-time AI planning and workflow execution at scale. This is deep systems work with tight reliability and security requirements. You’ll own large parts of our platform architecture and help define how physical engineering tools are automated, composed, and executed in production. What You’ll Own Architecting and building scalable backend services to support agentic workflows, orchestration logic, and state tracking. Building the integration layer between Bench and external engineering systems (e.g. CAD, simulation, PLM). Designing secure, containerised execution environments on AWS for running arbitrary, user-defined tools with strict isolation and dynamic dependency resolution. Implementing event-driven systems to coordinate agent actions, execution retries, logging, and monitoring. Requirements You don’t need 100% of the below. More than anything, we care about hunger, passion for this problem space and your track record of exceptional achievement. 1–3 YOE in software development in a fast-paced startup environment, ideally in high-performance or distributed systems. Strong proficiency in Python and Rust – our core service and sandbox development languages.| Experience with AWS , Docker, and secure, sandboxed execution environments. Built integrations with third-party APIs or enterprise systems. A first-principles mindset and a bias toward building foundational, extensible systems. Full-stack capability – you can own a feature end-to-end, from API to infrastructure to evaluation. You\’re an AI-native developer – you already use Cursor, Copilot, or similar tools to think, code, and iterate faster, and you\’re eager to push those tools to their limits. Bonus Round! Experience building infrastructure for asynchronous workflows, task orchestration, or agentic systems. Familiarity with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka). Experience designing high-trust, developer-facing systems (e.g., CLI tools, SDKs). Background in mechanical, electrical, or aerospace engineering, or direct experience with CAD/CAE tools like Onshape, Ansys, or SimScale. Why Join Us A rare opportunity to build software for hardware – unlike dev tools, software for hardware rarely evolves. We’re one of the few teams in the UK where you can combine your software skills and passion for hardware design. Early movers in a new category – this is a generational opportunity to define how AI transforms engineering, and build the foundation for a new category at the intersection of AI and hardware development. Agile, high-agency environment -you’ll work directly with the founders in a fast-moving team, with real ownership, fast feedback loops, and the chance to shape core product decisions. Meaningful equity -as an early team member, you’ll have significant participation in the upside. The Funding We’ve raised a £1M pre-seed round led by SuperSeed and with participation from 7 other investors, including EWOR – a top European accelerator with a 0.1% acceptance rate. We have the support, connections and resources to move fast and think big. We currently share portfolios with companies like AI Build, Magic.dev and GATE Space. The Founders In this role, you’ll work very closely with both of the founders – you’ll be reporting to Raihaan. Raihaan Usman, CTO – Aerospace Engineer, previously Engineering Lead at Imperial’s Karman Space Programme, an academic team of 50+ engineers aiming to be the first academic team to launch a reusable rocket into space. Shipped software patches to a live satellite at ESA. Martin Bielicki, CEO – Mechanical Engineer, previously founded and led Hyperlink, a team of 100+ engineers that designed and built London’s first Hyperloop Pod. Founded companies in e-commerce and digital marketing and worked in venture building. Compensation Competitive (but actually – we want the top 0.1% and we’re willing to pay for it). Meaningful equity stake. The Interview Process Submit your CV and answer the 2 application questions. 30 Minute Screening Call with Martin. Short take-home technical task. 60-minute technical interview with Raihaan. Last stage, culture fit dinner / office half day / interview with Martin and Raihaan. #J-18808-Ljbffr