Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform | London C&D Talent AdvisoryStevenage, United Kingdom
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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
- 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 TypeScript 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
- Compute isolation
- Data isolation
- Network isolation
- GitHub Actions
- Docker
- AKS
- Production-grade AI infrastructure
- LLM platforms
- RAG systems
- Agentic workflows
- Secure AI tool execution
Strong profile signals
- Former founder or technical founder
- Former CTO returning to an individual-contributor role
- Founding or early-stage engineering experience
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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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Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform | London in Stevenage employer: C&D Talent Advisory
C&D Talent Advisory is an exceptional employer that values innovation and expertise in the fintech sector, offering a fully remote role that allows you to work from anywhere in the UK, Netherlands, or France. With a strong focus on employee growth, we provide opportunities for professional development and a collaborative work culture that encourages creativity and problem-solving. Join us to be part of a dynamic team where your contributions directly impact high-performance trading infrastructure in a fast-paced environment.
