Founding Engineer (up to £140k)

This role is with one of Dex's trusted partner companies.

We work closely with their teams to truly understand their culture, goals, and what they're looking for, so we can match you with the right opportunity and give you context about the role before you commit to a process.

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Tell Dex your stack, seniority, and what you want to build.

We will manage your applications and surface other opportunities that are a fit.

The role

This company is building the compliance layer for regulated infrastructure.

Think public health estates, government buildings, transport hubs.

The problem is messy: critical safety evidence for these complex environments is scattered across PDFs and shared drives.

Their platform brings search, evidence, workflow, and assurance into one place, with traceable regulatory grounding.

It's a hard, impactful problem with paying customers in live environments, backed by leading investors.

You’ll be the senior addition to a three-person engineering team, working directly with the CTO and Head of ML & Platform.

This isn't about coding to a spec; it's about end-to-end ownership.

You’ll understand how users work, decide what needs building, then design and ship it.

Architectural decisions are yours, not a committee's.

This is a rare seat for an engineer who wants to shape product and architecture from day one, not just execute.

• The work
• Design and ship agentic AI workflows that hold up in production, solving real-world compliance challenges.
• Lead backend development in Python/Fast API, architecting the Postgre SQL data layer with domain-driven and event-driven patterns.
• Drive CI/CD pipelines and Azure deployments, ensuring robust, scalable infrastructure.
• Own the full product lifecycle from user problem to deployed solution, including occasional frontend work in React.
• Translate complex regulatory requirements into intuitive, traceable software features.

What You Bring

• End-to-end ownership at a startup: taking customer requirements through to production code, without needing to manage others.
• Deep expertise in Python backend development, applying domain-driven design, clean architecture, and event-driven patterns.
• Experience building and shipping large language model (LLM) applications in production, not just experiments.
• A proactive approach to AI coding tools, pushing their capabilities rather than resisting them.
• Ability to work from the Cambridge office once a week for team syncs.
• Why apply through Dex

Founding Engineer roles like this are rare.

They’re often oversubscribed, or hard to find outside of direct networks.

Apply through Dex to cut through the noise.

We'll brief you properly on the company and role, ensuring you're fully prepared before you even speak to them.

Skip the cold application and get a direct line to a high-impact opportunity.

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