Senior Software Engineer — AI & Data Infrastructure (Hybrid) in Newcastle upon Tyne

Onteric builds neurosymbolic AI and data infrastructure – combining neural networks with symbolic reasoning to create AI that’s fully explainable. We use this to convert documents, emails, web pages and screen content into detailed knowledge graphs, and use those to drive agents that actually get things done.

We’re a seed stage start-up. We recently raised £1.3M from VCs and prominent angels. We have contracts with household names in mortgages, insurance and lending. You’d be joining a team of five as a permanent employee. The role is based in Newcastle upon Tyne. We often work remotely, but you need to be willing to meet in-person 2-3 days per week.

We're looking for a software engineer who's comfortable solving difficult problems, sometimes open-ended research, but also shipping production code. An academic research background isn't necessary, but you should enjoy pulling apart a problem, thinking methodically, and building pragmatic solutions using first principles, following a research paper, or working without a guide. If you have that from years of building things in the real world, that’s great.

What we're looking for:

• Strong TypeScript experience, though we do use other languages like Python for some of our work.
• You can write code from first principles – not just gluing libraries or following patterns for frameworks.
• You enjoy working on problems that don't always have obvious answers.
• You’re willing to speak directly to our customers to fix a problem, gather feedback, or scope new features.
• You’re happy to use AI coding tools where they help, but aren’t reliant on them.
• Curiosity to learn new things, find a better way, and try things that sometimes might not work.

Bonus points if you have experience or understanding of, but we don’t expect everything:

• Machine learning but we’re not looking for deep expertise in creating foundation models.
• Familiarity with open source and open weight large language models or vision-language models.
• Graph and linked data tools and standards like Neo4j, RDF, or JSON-LD.
• Infrastructure or security experience, such as Terraform and AWS.
• Standards and data models used in insurance, finance, or open banking.
• Experience creating web extensions, UI automation, or OS-level automation.
• Writing technical papers, authoring publications, and engaging with academics.

A few things worth knowing:

• We're a small team so you'll have real ownership and influence, but that also means wearing multiple hats and being comfortable with ambiguity.
• You’ll be working alongside the CTO and two other engineers.
• We're in production with real customers in regulated industries, so this isn't speculative R&D – what you build has to work.
• Onteric was known as DataWollet until recently – we’re in process of rebranding. You’ll find information about us under both names.

Interview Process

Our process has four stages and we'll move through them quickly:

• A short intro call with Luke, our CTO to get to know each other and make sure we're a good fit on both sides.
• A technical conversation where we'll look at some code you've written - a GitHub repo, a side project, or something you're proud of. If you don't have anything public, we'll suggest an alternative. We want to understand how you think and approach things (we're not looking for perfect code).
• Meet the engineering team. This will be informal, there'll be no whiteboards unless you want one - this is a chance to see if we'd enjoy working together. It might be in person.
• A call with our CEO to talk about our plans, our culture, our strategy, and of course for anything you want to ask.