At a Glance
- Tasks: Build and evolve AI-native risk infrastructure for regulated enterprises.
- Company: Join a high-growth startup in the heart of London.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, equity options, daily team lunches, and a vibrant office environment.
- Other info: Enjoy a fast-paced environment with significant ownership and influence.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on customer-facing AI systems and shape engineering standards.
- Qualifications: Strong backend engineering experience with a focus on production AI systems.
The predicted salary is between 130000 - 170000 £ per year.
Founding Engineer, Agent Systems | London
Location
King's Cross, London
Work model
On-site by default, with some flexibility
Employment
Full-time
Level
Mid-Senior / Founding Engineer
Experience
Typically 6–7+ years, with flexibility for exceptional AI-native profiles
Estimated compensation
Industry
Enterprise AI / Agent Systems
Environment
- Seed-stage, high-growth startup
- About the opportunity
- Join a seed-stage company building AI-native risk infrastructure for regulated enterprises
- Work on production AI systems used across financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare
- Own the agent platform powering customer-facing AI features
- Build the orchestration, evaluation, and reliability layers around frontier LLMs
- Turn model capabilities into production systems that domain experts can trust
- Set engineering standards for when AI features are reliable enough to ship
- Operate with founding-team levels of ownership and technical influence
- Work in a company already generating seven-figure revenue through multi-year enterprise contracts
- What you'll own
- Build and evolve the core agent orchestration platform
- Design multi-step agent workflows and tool-calling systems
- Build context-management and agent-scaffolding infrastructure
- Develop secure sandboxing for agent execution
- Implement prompt-injection defenses and other agent-security controls
- Build production evaluation frameworks for fuzzy, high-stakes outputs
- Curate evaluation datasets and regression suites
- Design and improve LLM-as-judge systems
- Evaluate model performance across upgrades and provider changes
- Build retries, fallbacks, and circuit-breaker mechanisms
- Own prompt versioning and AI-quality infrastructure
- Design systems around async processing, queues, and idempotency
- Define the internal standard for production AI quality
- Own AI reliability and make ship/no-ship decisions when necessary
What we're looking for
- Strong professional backend engineering experience
- 1–2+ years of experience shipping production LLM-powered features
- Strong Type Script or Node. js experience
- Experience building customer-facing production AI systems
- Hands-on experience with agent frameworks
- Experience with tool calling and multi-step orchestration
- Production experience building AI evaluations
- Experience with dataset curation and regression testing
- Understanding of LLM-as-judge approaches and failure modes
- Strong systems-thinking ability
- Experience with asynchronous systems and queues
- Understanding of idempotency and reliability patterns
- Strong product-engineering mindset
- Ability to own features from customer problem through production deployment
- High level of autonomy and accountability
- Based in London or able to commute regularly for an on-site-first role
- Particularly valuable experience
- Anthropic APIs
- Open AI APIs
- Open-weight models
- Production LLM workloads at scale
- Agent orchestration frameworks
- AI evaluation infrastructure
- Model fallback architecture
- Prompt versioning
- Prompt-injection defense
- Agent security
- Sandboxed tool execution
- Production RAG systems
- High-stakes AI applications
- Compliance
- Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)
- Audit technology
- Cybersecurity
- Financial services
- Regulated enterprise software
- Strong profile signals
- Former founder or technical founder
- Former CTO returning to hands-on engineering
- Founding or early-stage engineering experience
- Experience at a high-growth product company
- Experience at a leading technology or AI organization
- Significant independent AI projects or side projects
- Strong evidence of product ownership
- History of shipping customer-facing systems end-to-end
- AI-native development workflow
- Heavy use of coding agents such as Claude Code or equivalent
- Ability to move between product, backend, AI systems, and reliability work
- Strong technical judgment rather than purely research-oriented expertise
- This role may not be the right fit if you
- Have exclusively front-end or front-end-first engineering experience
- Have a purely AI research background without production software engineering ownership
- Have worked primarily in Developer Relations or Developer Experience
- Have only built internal AI tools rather than customer-facing production systems
- Lack meaningful backend engineering experience
- Have AI experience limited to prototypes or demos
- Prefer research over shipping production products
- Lack experience taking ownership of production reliability
- Prefer narrowly scoped engineering responsibilities
- Are uncomfortable making judgment calls around AI quality and production readiness
- Are not comfortable working primarily on-site in London
- Technical environment
- Type Script
- Node. js
- React
- Tailwind
- Express
- Azure
- Postgres
- Terraform
- Git Hub Actions
- Docker
- Anthropic-first AI stack
- Claude Code
- What you'll get
- Founding-level ownership of the agent platform
- Significant influence over AI architecture and engineering standards
- Opportunity to build production-grade agent systems from an early stage
- Direct impact on customer-facing AI quality and reliability
- Exposure to frontier LLM APIs in demanding production environments
- Work on technically difficult evaluation and reliability problems
- Close collaboration with company leadership
- Top-decile London market compensation
- Meaningful EMI-eligible equity
- Significant AI tooling and API budgets
- Daily team lunch
- Specialty coffee
- King's Cross office with roof terrace and on-site facilities
- Fast-moving engineering environment with high autonomy
- #J-18808-Ljbffr
Founding Engineer, Agent Systems in Cambridge employer: C&D Talent Advisory
As a Founding Engineer at our seed-stage startup in King's Cross, London, you'll be part of a dynamic team shaping the future of AI-native risk infrastructure. We offer a collaborative work culture that prioritises autonomy and innovation, alongside competitive compensation and meaningful equity opportunities. Join us to make a direct impact on customer-facing AI systems while enjoying the benefits of a vibrant office environment with excellent facilities.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Founding Engineer, Agent Systems in Cambridge
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at C&D Talent Advisory or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to C&D Talent Advisory.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like C&D Talent Advisory.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like C&D Talent Advisory that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Founding Engineer, Agent Systems in Cambridge
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at C&D Talent Advisory.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at C&D Talent Advisory and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at C&D Talent Advisory
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If C&D Talent Advisory uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
