Staff Product Engineer UK / USA in London

Artifact AI is building the first truly agentic accounting platform—end-to-end, zero manual work. Hiring extreme performers only (top 1% in something hard). Small team, high ownership, no comfort mode.

Why this role exists

Artifact AI is rebuilding accounting from the ground up. Not making the software incrementally better, rebuilding the work itself, so one accountant does what a team used to do and a set of books closes itself in the background while a human stays in the loop. Two products do the heavy lifting. Arti handles ingestion, matching, reconciliation and journal posting. Omni orchestrates 600+ platforms and lets accountants build agentic workflows using natural language.

The role

You will own real surface area. From the database schemas to a front-end component someone clicks on a Tuesday. Backend is home (Python, async, the messy distributed parts), but you'll move into the AI layer or the front-end or the infra when the problem is there. Wherever the work actually is. You set direction on what you own. Build the code that matters. Push back when you think we're wrong. You raise the bar of people around you and you have done it before. Pace matters here. Speed and quality pull against each other. The skill is knowing what to spend the day on and what to ship rough and fix Friday. You don't reach for the cleverest tool, the trendiest pattern, or the abstraction that makes you look senior. You pick the boring thing that works, because you've got nothing to prove. You use AI to the max, or anything else that makes you 10x. And you know when to put the tools down and get your hands dirty so the shipping bar holds. Low ego, high standards. You are kind to the humans on the team and brutal on the work. You do not confuse the two.

You know the domain. You have a domain background in fintech, accounting, audit, ERP, or financial close; you have either built in this space or worked closely with it.

Bonus

• You have been a founder or founding engineer of a venture-backed company.
• You have built developer-facing products, APIs, or SDKs.
• You have shipped agent systems with structured tool-use at scale.
• You have meaningful Go, Rust, or TypeScript backend experience to complement your Python.
• You have hired, ramped, or mentored other engineers not as a manager, but as the senior IC people gravitated toward.

What you will not do here

• You will not have a process between you and the work. No JIRA tickets handed down, no PMs gating your access to customers, no architecture review board you have to convince before writing code.
• You will not manage people in this role. This is a senior IC track. If your goal is to run a team of 30, this is the wrong role for you, though we are happy to support a transition into management later for the right person.
• You will not work 9-to-5. We are trying to compress what would normally be a decade of work into two or three years. We expect you are the kind of person who finds that energising rather than alarming.

Working at Artifact

Artifact's culture is intense and not for everyone. We work hard, we ship fast, and we are direct with each other when something is off. We hire grown-ups and we expect grown-up behaviour. We celebrate wins together, and we do not pretend everything is fine when it isn't.

We are a fit for you if:

• You are unreasonable about quality.
• You are happiest when you are shipping.
• You would rather argue about a design doc than sit through a status meeting.
• You have a real, weird, founder-shaped reason to want to spend the next several years rebuilding accounting.

We are not a fit for you if:

• You want predictable career progression frameworks.
• You desire heavy processes, formal mentorship structures, or strong work-life-balance signals.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We hire on the basis of evidence that you can do the work and want to do it here, full stop.