Engineering Lead

Build the Platform Powering AI for Real Estate

Location: London (preferred), Dubai or San Francisco

Reports to: Founder & CEO

About Smart Bricks

Smart Bricks is building the future of AI for real estate. Every year, trillions of dollars are invested across residential, commercial and alternative real estate using fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual workflows. We're building an AI-native platform that helps investors, developers, lenders, governments and Fortune 500 companies source opportunities, underwrite investments, perform due diligence and manage portfolios using AI.

Alongside our software platform, we're building an Applied AI Lab that works directly with some of the world's largest real estate organisations to redesign complex workflows using AI. Every customer engagement generates institutional knowledge. Every deployment strengthens the platform. Every improvement compounds across every future customer.

We've raised over $5 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and are backed by some of the world's leading technology ecosystems, including Techstars, Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft through their AI and startup programmes.

Our Founder is a Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur and an Andreessen Horowitz Scout, helping identify and back the next generation of AI founders globally.

We're building our founding leadership team across London, Dubai and San Francisco. Our London team is based at Balderton Capital, one of Europe's leading venture capital firms, giving us the opportunity to work alongside some of Europe's most ambitious founders, investors and technology companies.

This is a chance to join at the earliest stage of building what we believe will be one of the world's leading Applied AI companies for real estate.

Why exceptional engineers join us:

• Raised $5M+, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
• Backed by Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Techstars
• London office based at Balderton Capital
• Building across London, Dubai and San Francisco
• Founder recognised as Forbes 30 Under 30 and an Andreessen Horowitz Scout
• Building Applied AI with leading institutional real estate organisations

Why this role?

We're not hiring an engineering manager. We're hiring one of the engineers who will define the technical foundations of Smart Bricks. Every architectural decision you make will influence every product we build, every enterprise customer we serve and every engineer who joins after you. You'll join when the platform is still being defined, working directly with the Founder, Product Lead and Applied AI Lab. If you want a role where your technical decisions compound over the next decade, this is it.

What you'll build:

• Build the engineering organisation.
• Recruit and lead the founding engineering team in year one, at a hiring bar in the top 0.1% of applicants, and set the standards that scale with the company. You'll build a culture of:

• Ownership and craftsmanship
• Simplicity and pragmatism
• Speed without compromising quality
• Curiosity and continuous learning

Goal: an engineering organisation where exceptional people do the best work of their careers.

Design the platform architecture. Architect the technical foundations of the institutional platform, built to enable rapid experimentation without compromising long-term scalability:

• Agent orchestration and workflow engines
• Retrieval systems and knowledge infrastructure
• Enterprise APIs and integrations
• Evaluation infrastructure and observability
• Security, developer tooling and deployment infrastructure

Build AI-native infrastructure. Traditional SaaS architecture isn't enough. You'll build for AI-native software and stay pragmatic about what belongs in production:

• Agent execution frameworks and multi-agent coordination
• Memory systems and context management
• Human-in-the-loop workflows and tool orchestration
• Evaluation pipelines and enterprise deployment

Engineering × Applied AI. Operate as one continuous learning system with the Head of Applied AI. Every enterprise deployment raises one question, 'what belongs in the platform?', and your job is turning those answers into scalable software. Target: New deployments should be served by reusable platform capabilities rather than bespoke build.

Build for enterprise scale. Customers trust us with mission-critical workflows, so enterprise quality is the baseline, not an afterthought. Design for:

• Reliability and performance
• Security and explainability
• Observability, scalability and extensibility

The foundations you build become one of Smart Bricks' greatest competitive advantages.

What Success Looks Like

Within your first 12 months you'll have:

• Designed and launched the first generation of our institutional AI platform.
• Built the founding engineering team.
• Established engineering standards, principles and development practices.
• Built AI infrastructure capable of supporting multiple enterprise deployments.
• Reduced the effort required to onboard new enterprise customers by converting bespoke work into reusable platform capabilities.
• Established a modern engineering culture recognised for exceptional quality, speed and craftsmanship.
• Become a trusted technical partner to Product, Applied AI and the Founder.

Success won't be measured by lines of code. It will be measured by how quickly the platform becomes smarter, more scalable and easier to build upon.

Who we're looking for

We're looking for builders, not managers. You've taken products from zero to one, made foundational architectural decisions, written production code and hired exceptional engineers. You move naturally between first-principles thinking and pragmatic execution.

Specifically, you'll likely have:

• 7 to 15 years building AI infrastructure, distributed systems, enterprise software or developer platforms, with genuine technical depth rather than management breadth.
• Led an engineering team through a high-growth phase at a fast-scaling startup or scaleup, ideally taking a team from single digits to 20+ and the systems that come with that scale.
• Shipped at least 2 to 3 products from zero to one, ideally AI-native or used in production by real enterprise customers.
• Deep, hands-on architecture experience across two or more of: agentic systems, workflow platforms, knowledge systems, distributed systems, infrastructure products or developer tooling.
• Strong core engineering fundamentals (systems design, data modelling, performance, security) alongside real fluency with the modern AI stack: LLMs, RAG, vector databases, MCP, agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Set the hiring and technical bar for a team while staying close enough to the code to debug production yourself.
• Worked directly with product teams and customer-facing organisations, ideally enterprise.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Maths or a related technical field from a strong institution. Though a track record of exceptional shipped work outweighs any qualification.

You're equally comfortable writing production code, designing system architecture, reviewing pull requests, debugging live systems, hiring, and speaking directly with enterprise customers. Experience in real estate isn't required. We care far more about exceptional engineers who enjoy solving complex problems and building AI-native systems from first principles.

We believe exceptional people should share in the value they create. You'll receive a highly competitive salary and a meaningful equity package, private healthcare, flexible working, an annual learning and conference budget, access to the latest AI models and developer tooling, and a seat in our London office at Balderton Capital, alongside one of Europe's leading VC ecosystems.

How We Work

We hold exceptionally high standards. We think from first principles, build systems rather than features, move quickly without compromising quality, care deeply about craftsmanship, challenge assumptions respectfully and default to ownership. We optimise for customer outcomes over technical elegance.

Why Join

We move insanely fast, with real rigour and standards, to redefine what AI infrastructure looks like for real assets. You'll work directly with the Founder, Product Lead and Applied AI Lab, define the architecture from first principles, build the founding engineering team, and have outsized influence over every product we launch and every engineer who joins after you. If you're the type to get out of bed to build the infrastructure that changes how AI scales real companies, in this generation and the ones after, Smart Bricks is the place for you. We'd love to talk.