Founding Engineer — AI Governance Platform in City of London

Banks are deploying AI that makes lending decisions affecting millions of people. Regulators across the UK and EU now require that someone independent reviews those systems before they go live. Not the team that built them — someone credentialed, independent, whose name goes on the assessment. No institution exists to do this at scale. We are building it.

We are assembling a small group of named expert practitioners — former regulators, AI safety researchers, senior lawyers — who sign independent governance assessments for regulated institutions. You are building the platform that powers their work.

THE ROLE

You are employee number one. Founding Engineer. You own every product and technical decision. The CEO brings the commercial vision — which clients to serve, which experts to recruit, what the market needs. You translate that into a product. You decide what gets built first. You design the user experience. You choose the stack. You architect the data model. You build it. You ship it. You iterate based on what real users (expert practitioners and regulated institutions) actually need.

You sit with the CEO in London. When he comes back from a call with a bank's Chief Risk Officer, you hear what the client needs and decide together what to ship next. When a former regulator gives feedback on the assessment interface, you redesign it that afternoon. This is not a role where someone writes tickets for you. There are no tickets. There is a problem, a market, and everything that needs to be built.

WHAT YOU OWN

• The expert assessment platform — a structured tool where practitioners record governance signals during AI reviews (judgments, risk scores, reasoning chains, regulatory citations)
• The expert portal — practitioners log in, see engagements, access the workbench, track their work
• The client interface — regulated institutions see status, upload documents, download signed assessments
• The data infrastructure — every assessment generates structured data worth hundreds to thousands of pounds per event. You design how it is captured, stored, and protected
• The website — institutional, clean, credible
• The product roadmap — you create it, you own it

WHAT THE FIRST 6 MONTHS LOOK LIKE

• Month 1: Assessment workbench MVP live. Website live. You and the CEO simulate an assessment together.
• Month 2: A real expert uses it on a real client engagement. You iterate from their feedback.
• Month 3: First paying client downloads their assessment through the platform.
• Month 4–6: Features driven by real usage. Admin tools. Early AI experiments using the growing dataset. You start planning your first hire.

WHO YOU ARE

• You have built a product from zero. A startup, a side project with real users, an internal tool that everyone depended on. You were the person who decided what to build, not just how.
• You are full-stack. Backend, frontend, database, deployment. You have opinions about tools but you are not religious. You pick what ships fast.
• You have taste. When someone describes a workflow, you see the interface. You care about whether the thing is good to use, not just whether it works.
• You have phase discipline. When you hear about our long-term vision (multi-region infrastructure, AI-powered verification at scale), your instinct is 'that's later — what do I ship this month?'

MUST HAVE

• You have shipped a product that real people used — show it to us
• Full-stack: backend + frontend + database + deployment
• London, in-person, full-time (Central London)
• Comfortable being the only technical person for 6–12 months
• You make product decisions, not just engineering decisions

STRONG SIGNALS

• Employee #1–5 at a startup before
• Designed data models for structured capture or annotation
• Interested in AI, governance, or regulation
• Strong opinions about product design
• Deployed production systems on AWS or equivalent

NOT REQUIRED

• Specific years of experience
• Knowledge of AI governance or financial regulation
• Polished consumer app portfolio
• Management experience

WHAT YOU GET

• Salary depending on experience
• Founding equity (EMI options, 4-year vest, 1-year cliff) in a company building governance infrastructure in a market being created by law
• Founding Engineer title — employee number one
• You work directly with former regulators and AI safety researchers, building tools they use on real engagements
• When we build a team, you lead it
• 25 days leave + bank holidays + pension

HOW TO APPLY

Send a short note (3–5 sentences, not a cover letter) and a link to something you have built. A repo, a live product, a demo. That matters more than your CV alone.