Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform | London in Hitchin

Tech Tree is an AI-driven recruitment platform working with high-growth companies.

• Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform | London
• Location: King's Cross, London
• Work model: On-site by default, with some flexibility
• Employment: Full-time
• Level: Mid-Senior / Founding Engineer
• Experience: 6+ years
• Estimated compensation: £130,000–£170,000 + Equity
• Industry: Enterprise AI / Risk Infrastructure
• Environment: Seed-stage, high-growth startup
• About The Opportunity
• Join a seed-stage company building AI-native risk infrastructure for regulated enterprises
• Build systems used by customers across financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare
• Own both core backend services and the infrastructure foundations they run on
• Shape a platform where security, compliance, reliability, and enterprise trust are critical to winning customers
• Work directly on architecture that supports multi-year enterprise deployments
• Operate with founding-team levels of ownership and autonomy
• Partner closely with company leadership on technical direction and platform evolution
• What You'll Own
• Build and own backend services across the platform
• Develop APIs, asynchronous workflows, and core data models
• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure foundations
• Own Infrastructure as Code using Terraform
• Design secure multi-tenant isolation across compute, data, and network layers
• Own deployment pipelines and CI/CD infrastructure
• Build and maintain observability systems
• Establish and improve production on-call practices
• Develop infrastructure for long-running AI agent workloads
• Build systems for large-scale document processing
• Design secure execution environments for AI tools and agents
• Automate compliance evidence collection
• Build infrastructure supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar frameworks
• Develop internal tooling that allows engineers to ship quickly without compromising security or reliability

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience
• Significant infrastructure ownership in production environments
• Strong professional experience with a backend programming language
• Strong Type Script or Node. js experience preferred
• Production experience with Terraform
• Strong CI/CD experience
• Experience with containerized production workloads
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure
• Experience owning systems through deployment and production operations
• Strong security fundamentals
• Experience with IAM and access-control architecture
• Experience with network segmentation
• Strong understanding of secrets management
• Awareness of software supply-chain security
• Experience designing and implementing compliance controls
• Hands‑on ownership of SOC 2, ISO 27001, or comparable compliance programs
• Operational maturity from supporting production systems that matter
• Ability to balance rapid product delivery with security and reliability requirements
• High level of autonomy and technical ownership
• Particularly Valuable Experience
• Azure
• Azure Container Apps
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure Front Door
• Entra ID
• Multi‑tenant Saa S infrastructure
• Compute isolation
• Data isolation
• Network isolation
• Audit‑sensitive enterprise products
• Git Hub Actions
• Docker
• Postgres
• AKS
• Production‑grade AI infrastructure
• LLM platforms
• RAG systems
• Agentic workflows
• Secure AI tool execution
• High‑volume document‑processing systems
• Strong profile signals
• Former founder or technical founder
• Former CTO returning to an individual‑contributor role
• Founding or early‑stage engineering experience
• Strong product‑engineering mindset
• History of owning architecture as well as implementation
• Experience shipping backend systems directly used by customers
• Startup‑style production ownership
• Side projects or evidence of independent technical building
• Technical talks, open‑source work, or other evidence of deep engineering interest
• Experience working in environments where reliability and compliance directly affect commercial outcomes
• Strong AI‑first development mindset
• Comfortable using AI coding tools such as Claude Code or equivalent
• This role may not be the right fit if you
• Have primarily front‑end engineering experience
• Lack meaningful backend or infrastructure ownership
• Have worked exclusively in cybersecurity without hands‑on product engineering
• Have primarily Developer Relations or Developer Experience experience
• Have spent your career only on internal tooling without customer‑facing product impact
• Have limited experience operating production systems
• Have no practical Infrastructure as Code or CI/CD experience
• Have only participated in compliance processes rather than designing and implementing controls
• Prefer highly specialized infrastructure work without broader product ownership
• Prefer large‑company structures with narrowly defined responsibilities
• Are not comfortable working primarily on‑site in London
• What You'll Get
• Founding‑level technical ownership
• Significant influence over platform architecture
• Direct impact on which enterprise customers the company can support
• Opportunity to build secure, production‑grade AI infrastructure from an early stage
• Exposure to complex enterprise security and compliance requirements
• Close collaboration with company leadership
• Top‑decile London market compensation
• Meaningful EMI‑eligible equity
• Strong AI tooling and API budgets
• Daily team lunch
• Specialty coffee
• King's Cross office with roof terrace and on‑site facilities
• High‑autonomy engineering environment
• Opportunity to build both product and infrastructure systems end‑to‑end
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