Founding Product Engineer in London

Founding Product Engineer - London UK - PARAFORM

Client: Serova

Role: Founding Product Engineer

Job Type: Full-time

Location: London, UK (On-site)

$185K - $205K

Company Overview

Company focuses on building vaccines for cancer patients, recently FDA approved.

Located in London and San Francisco, with a strong emphasis on innovation and impact.

Role Requirements

Hiring for a Founding Product Engineer and a Founding Design Engineer, potentially merging roles.

Onsite work in San Francisco or London, with remote considered for exceptional candidates.

Candidate Requirements

Strong design sense with UI/UX skills; capable of implementing front-end and back-end solutions.

Experience in building products from 0 to 1 in a startup environment; ideally with 1-2 years of experience.

Technical Requirements

Proficiency in Postgres, Python, and React.

Experience with both design and full stack development preferred.

Compensation and Logistics

Salary range of $185K - $205K, with flexibility for exceptional candidates.

Open to visa transfers but prefer not to sponsor new visas.

Timeline and Urgency

Ready to move quickly but not an urgent hire.

Emphasis on daily actioning of candidates to streamline the hiring process.

Interview Process

Initial portfolio review followed by a call with Elian and meetings with the founders.

Take-home exercise, possibly completed onsite.

Pain Points

Lack of dedicated product and design engineering roles, currently managed by existing team members.

Need for operational excellence and internal tool development.

Ideal Candidate Profile

Demonstrates taste and ownership in previous work, preferably in early-stage startups.

High agency and ability to pick up new skills quickly; industry experience in oncology is a plus but not required.

Dealbreaker

Work experience

Strong design sense - portfolio demonstrating design taste and functional utility (thoughtful UX flow)

Should be able to implement design ideas independently (front- end & back- end)

Hard skills

Fullstack engineering experience owning both frontend and backend

UI/UX design experience and evidence of taste (personal site, portfolio, or side project)

Miscellaneous

Ability to work on- site in San Francisco or London

Baseline

Seniority

1 - 6 years of experience as a product engineer or fullstack engineer with design sense

Nice-to-have

Work experience

Experience shipping consumer- facing or design- led products (used and judged by non- engineers)

Experience at a Seed to Series B startup (small teams, low process overhead).

What we're looking for:

We need someone with 1 to 6 years of full-time engineering experience who has owned a product end to end (frontend and backend), ideally from 0 to 1 at a Seed to Series B startup, and has real product and design taste. You should be comfortable taking loosely defined requests from clinical, wet lab, and operations teams and turning them into polished, useful software without a spec, a designer, or a PM. You should also have a track record of shipping products that non-engineers actually used and judged. Bonus points if you have UI/UX design experience (the ideal profile is close to a design engineer), have built scientific or dense-data UIs like dashboards and visualizations, or were a founder or one of the first 10 employees somewhere.

Anyone can generate code with LLMs now, so what sets people apart is judgment. That means knowing what to build, how it should feel, and how the app should be structured, not just shipping whatever Claude produces. Years of experience matter less than the work itself. A strong portfolio, personal site, or well-thought-out side project counts for a lot. You don't need a biology or oncology background, but you should be curious and pick things up fast.

What you'll do

Build Serova's first patient- and clinician-facing product. This means turning the data Serova already produces internally (antigen prediction, vaccine design, case status) into a clear, opinionated interface where patients and doctors can see results and manage their case.

Rebuild the existing scientific dashboard from scratch. Today it explains the vaccine design process to clinical teams and patients. You'll own its UX, visual design, and implementation, and give it a much more opinionated design.

Work closely with the clinical, wet lab, manufacturing, and engineering teams to understand their workflows and design the best UX for each one.

Build internal tools and front-end services that coordinate operations, such as who can access which patient data, email follow-ups, and processes with manufacturing and CRO partners. All of these run on one shared database.

Lead new product surfaces from concept to production across the full stack (Postgres, Python, React/TypeScript), making sound architecture decisions along the way.

Keep improving and extending Serova's internal systems to support operational excellence as the company grows from about a dozen patients to many more, and expands beyond the US to Australia and Europe.

Note: This is a founding role. Today, an engineer on the team covers these product surfaces part-time. You'll be the first person fully dedicated to them, and you'll shape both the product and engineering culture.

Tech stack

React, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL.

What to ask candidates

Share a link to your portfolio or a side project that best shows your design taste. Tell us about something you built that real people actually use and how you thought through its UX flow.

Tell us about a product you took from zero to one end to end. What did you personally own across design and frontend and backend?

Can you work on-site in San Francisco or London? Do you need a visa transfer or any other sponsorship to work there?

Can the candidate be on-site? If not, is the candidate willing to relocate?

What is their salary expectation?

How actively is this candidate exploring new opportunities?