Staff Product Engineer in London

Artifact AI is building the first truly agentic accounting platform—end-to-end, zero manual work. We are hiring extreme performers only (top 1% in something hard). Our team is small, with high ownership and no comfort mode.

Artifact AI is rebuilding accounting from the ground up. Not making the software incrementally better, but rebuilding the work itself, so one accountant does what a team used to do and a set of books closes itself in the background while a human stays in the loop.

Two products do the heavy lifting: Arti handles ingestion, matching, reconciliation, and journal posting, while Omni orchestrates 600+ platforms and lets accountants build agentic workflows using natural language. We are backed by a16z, based in London and NYC, and accounting firms run their clients' month-end on us today. Growth is about to bend sharply.

The role involves:

• Owning real surface area, from database schemas to front-end components.
• Setting direction on what you own and building the code that matters.
• Knowing when to push back and raising the bar of those around you.
• Balancing speed and quality, knowing what to spend the day on and what to ship rough and fix later.
• Using AI to the max or anything else that makes you 10x, while also getting your hands dirty when necessary.
• Maintaining low ego and high standards, being kind to the team while being brutal on the work.
• Having a domain background in fintech, accounting, audit, ERP, or financial close.

Bonus qualifications include:

• Experience as a founder or founding engineer of a venture-backed company.
• Building developer-facing products, APIs, or SDKs.
• Shipping agent systems with structured tool-use at scale.
• Meaningful experience in Go, Rust, or TypeScript to complement Python.
• Hiring, ramping, or mentoring other engineers as a senior IC.

What you will not do here:

• Have a process between you and the work; no JIRA tickets, PMs, or architecture review boards.
• Manage people; this is a senior IC track.
• Work 9-to-5; we expect you to find the fast-paced environment energising.

Working at Artifact:

Our culture is intense and not for everyone. We work hard, ship fast, and communicate directly. We hire grown-ups and expect grown-up behaviour. We celebrate wins together and do not pretend everything is fine when it isn't.

We are a fit for you if:

• You are unreasonable about quality.
• You are happiest when shipping.
• You prefer discussing design rather than attending status meetings.
• You have a strong reason to rebuild accounting.

We are not a fit for you if:

• You want predictable career progression frameworks.
• You prefer heavy processes and formal mentorship structures.
• You seek strong work-life-balance signals.

How we hire:

• Intro call (30 min) to discuss mutual fit and your background.
• Technical deep-dive (90 min) including a Design System + Pair Programming session.
• Take-home + review (5–8 hours) of a scoped problem from our actual codebase.
• Culture round (30 min) for direct conversation about expectations.
• Reverse interview where you can ask anyone on the team anything.
• Offer where there is mutual fit.

We move fast; the whole loop is typically two weeks. If we are slow, it is because we are deliberating, and we will keep you informed. We are an equal opportunity employer, hiring based on evidence of capability and desire to work here.