Staff/Principal AI Engineer

Fifth Dimension is introducing vibe working to document-heavy industries. We currently partner with real estate businesses across the US, EU, and APAC, automating complex workflows, surfacing insights from documents, and enabling professionals to focus on higher-impact work. Our AI workspace reshapes how large investment managers and developers manage leases, development materials, and investment decisions.

We’re a London- and New York-based startup with strong runway, supported by Tier 1 European and US investors. Our founders, Johnny Morris and Dr. Kate Jarvis, bring a distinctive mix of experience: Johnny has over 17 years applying data and analytics in Real Estate, while Kate holds a Stanford PhD and brings 12 years of executive experience across startups in Silicon Valley and London.

At Fifth Dimension, we set high standards while staying supportive. We value experimentation and constructive challenge. Our values—Own It, Ship It, and Don’t Be Boring—guide how we work and help us deliver strong outcomes in an environment of continuous improvement.

The Challenge: It’s 9am on a Monday. Using Claude Code, you’ve just shipped a new extraction pipeline that changes how property leases are analysed. By midday, a major real estate client writes: “This just saved us 40 hours of work.” By Thursday, you’re working directly with their engineering team to integrate your APIs into an enterprise document system. On Friday, you’re celebrating with the team as data moves cleanly between platforms, opening up new capabilities for investors to make faster, better-informed decisions across their portfolios.

About You: You’re a highly experienced software engineer who has seen the impact AI can have and wants to apply it to real commercial problems. You don’t only write code—you design systems that make users wonder how they managed before. You’ve built strong engineering and architectural skills over many years. You keep up with developments in AI and know how to choose the right technique for each problem. Your experience shipping AI into production has shown you that success comes from deep problem understanding, not just model choice.

You’re comfortable using AI coding tools such as Claude Code to move faster and focus on higher-level design decisions. You see effective collaboration with AI as a core part of modern engineering practice. You pay close attention to detail and are happy working through dense documents and complex codebases to fully understand a system. You thrive in fast-moving environments, adapt quickly, mentor other engineers, and work well with commercial teams and customers. You’re motivated by continuous improvement, viewing hard problems as opportunities to grow. You look for challenges that stretch your abilities and value environments where you can both contribute and keep developing as an engineer.

Your Impact: Reporting to our CTO, Chen, you’ll design and deliver AI-driven solutions for our enterprise customers. You’ll work closely with a strong engineering team to build scalable systems that add real value and extend our generative AI platform. You’ll own core capabilities end-to-end, from early customer discussions through architecture, implementation, rollout, and adoption.

Day to Day, You Will:

• Think like a Product Manager: own key product areas while balancing technical quality and business outcomes.
• Deliver complex features end-to-end, from concept through production and customer adoption.
• Work with product and commercial teams to turn customer needs into resilient technical solutions.
• Use AI coding tools such as Claude Code to speed up development.
• Lead work on features addressing our customers’ most challenging problems, including:
• Large-scale data extraction from property leases.
• Workflow automation for planning document analysis and advisory drafting.
• Multi-step agentic content generation for market research reports.
• Build in data privacy and security from the start.
• Track relevant research and emerging technologies.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to engineering standards and best practices.
• Invest in your own development by tackling ambitious technical work.
• Apply our engineering principles: intellectual honesty, time awareness, clear communication, and innovation.

Our Values and Engineering Culture: At 5D, we live by three principles: Own It, Ship It, and Don’t Be Boring. Our engineering culture emphasises:

• Product-Minded Engineering: Understanding the purpose behind features and shaping product decisions with technical insight.
• Intellectual Honesty: Supporting discussions with evidence and being open about what we don’t yet know.
• Effective Time Management: Using clear timeboxes and moving on when an approach isn’t working.
• Clear Communication: Writing readable, self-explanatory code and thorough documentation.
• Innovation Mindset: Forming informed opinions, learning continuously, and evolving our approach.
• Personal Growth: Encouraging development through meaningful challenges and skill expansion.

Intellectual Curiosity and Honesty in Practice: An example of how we work: early in our AI development, an engineer noticed that certain prompt words like “concise” or “creative” disproportionately affected outputs—internally nicknamed “demon words.” Instead of accepting this behaviour, they spent a week systematically identifying every instance, testing alternatives, and documenting patterns. This curiosity about why things behaved as they did, combined with openness about uncertainty, led to measurable reliability improvements. This mindset—digging deep and sharing both learnings and mistakes—is central to how we operate at 5D.

What We’re Looking For:

• Experience in fast-growing startups or similarly high-pace environments.
• A record of building software within teams with strong engineering practices.
• Proven ownership of products from definition through delivery and adoption.
• Strong Python experience, shipping customer-facing features on critical paths.
• Experience designing and maintaining robust APIs and integrations.
• Familiarity with AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code).
• Demonstrated intellectual curiosity and openness in problem solving.
• Ability to balance short-term customer needs with long-term architecture.
• Clear communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ambition and resilience suited to a seed-stage company.
• Commercial awareness and focus on delivering customer value.
• Commitment to learning and personal development.

Nice to Have (Not Required):

• Experience in real estate, legal, or financial domains.
• Background in testing, deployment, and production-grade systems.
• Experience with component-based architectures or microservices.
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.

What We Offer: We’re building something ambitious and are looking for people who want to do the same. Our benefits go beyond typical startup packages, including tailored support for significant life challenges (such as IVF, gender-affirming care, ADHD diagnosis, and more), alongside generous parental leave.

• £100,000–£160,000 annual salary plus meaningful equity.
• 5% enhanced pension contributions.
• Unlimited annual leave.
• £100 monthly wellbeing budget.
• Personalised support, which may include contributions toward:
• Gender-affirming care.
• Private specialists and scans.
• ADHD / Autism diagnosis.
• IVF.
• Therapy.
• Enhanced parental leave: 14 weeks full pay for primary caregivers (then statutory) and 6 weeks full pay for secondary caregivers.
• Electric car salary-sacrifice scheme.
• £1,000 annual training budget.

The Process: Submit your CV and responses to a short set of standard questions, initial conversation with our CTO, live task and competency interview, in-person culture interview with team members, including both founders. Alternatively, a paid one-week trial is available for candidates who can commit to it.