Platform Engineer

Native is a VC-backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for database reasoning. This is hard.

This is an unsolved problem that, once solved, will change how every enterprise operates.

We recently published our results, achieving rank #1 on the industry-standard benchmark.

Our research team is based in London.

Everyone at Native has high agency, is obsessed with the problem we are solving, embraces the intensity of a 6-day week, and has the ambition to build something world-changing.

We are exceptional engineers and researchers taking a novel approach to accurate database reasoning.

About the role

This is a founding Platform Engineer role, with the opportunity to shape Native’s infrastructure and systems architecture from day one. You will build the platform that turns cutting-edge research into reliable, production-grade systems.

• Design, build, and operate the core platform that powers research and production workloads
• Productionise research systems into robust, scalable services
• Build internal platforms and tooling for researchers and engineers
• Own compute, storage, networking, and deployment infrastructure
• Design and operate CI/CD, observability, and reliability systems
• Think deeply about performance, isolation, fault tolerance, and failure modes
• Design systems that prioritise correctness, reproducibility, and debuggability
• Help define the long-term platform and systems architecture of the company

Required experience

• Strong experience with Python in production systems, plus at least one systems or backend language (e.g. Rust, Go, C++, Java)
• Experience designing, building, and running production infrastructure or platform systems
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, networking, and distributed systems
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and modern deployment environments (e.g. AWS/GCP, containers, orchestration)
• Comfortable operating at the boundary between research and production
• Experience building internal tooling or developer platforms
• Engineering taste: you care about simplicity, correctness, and long-term operability
• High ownership mindset — you build it, run it, and make it better

This is a rare chance to join a founding team operating at the frontier of AI, with the resources to win.

Benefits

• Impact: Build the infrastructure foundation for a new class of AI system in an under-explored, massively valuable domain
• Team: A small, collaborative, world-class research and engineering team based in central London
• Ownership: Founding-level equity with meaningful upside
• Compensation: Competitive salary that lets you focus on building something great
• Direction: Shape how frontier AI research becomes reliable, production-grade systems from day one

Culture

At Native, we look for people with exceptional engineering ability who want to win.

Everyone loves building and is ambitious enough to want to change how the world operates for the better.

• We run towards hard problems
• We care deeply about systems that are robust and transparent
• We value first-principles thinking and clean abstractions
• We take ownership, move fast, and hold a high bar for correctness
• If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, are intrinsically motivated, and want to have a huge impact, we are a great fit.