Founding ML / AI Engineer
📍 London | On-site / field exposure
💰 Up to £150,000 + meaningful equity
📄 Permanent | Founding Team
We’re working with an ambitious, early-stage technology company building AI-powered software for high-value physical operations.
The business is tackling a genuinely difficult problem: helping complex operations respond in real time when plans change, resources move, delays occur and multiple constraints interact.
The company has already secured major enterprise traction, with an initial customer deployment live and significant commercial pipeline, following a recent multi-million-pound pre-seed raise.
This is an opportunity to join at a very early stage and play a fundamental role in building the intelligence behind the product.
The Role
As a Founding ML / AI Engineer, you'll work closely with the founders to build algorithms and AI systems capable of making decisions in complex, constantly changing operational environments.
This isn't a role where you'll simply be plugging an LLM into an existing application. You'll be working on problems involving optimisation, state, constraints, planning, decision-making and agentic AI.
You'll have significant ownership over the technical direction and will be expected to get close to the real-world problem — including spending time with customers and understanding how operations actually work.
What you'll be doing
Build and deploy ML and AI systems for real-world operational problems
Develop optimisation and decision-making algorithms
Work with state machines, constraints and complex operational data
Build agentic AI systems and intelligent workflows
Develop models and systems that can respond to changing conditions in real time
Work closely with backend engineers to integrate intelligence into production systems
Experiment rapidly and turn successful approaches into robust production software
Work directly with founders and customers to understand complex operational problems
Spend time in live operational environments and translate those learnings into reusable technology
Help establish the company's technical direction around AI and ML
What we're looking for
Strong software engineering fundamentals
Significant experience with Python
Strong understanding of ML/AI systems
Experience building and deploying AI/ML products into production
Experience with optimisation, planning, scheduling or constraint-based problems is highly valuable
Strong understanding of algorithms and data structures
Experience with LLMs, agentic AI or modern AI architectures
Comfortable working with ambiguity and solving problems from first principles
Experience working with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS
Ability to move between research, experimentation and production engineering
Entrepreneurial mindset and willingness to take ownership
Experience in operations research, optimisation, reinforcement learning, scheduling or other decision-making systems would be particularly interesting.
Why join?
This is a genuine founding engineering opportunity.
You'll have:
Up to £150,000 salary, flexible for exceptional candidates
Meaningful equity
Direct access to the founders
Significant influence over the technical direction
The opportunity to work on a genuinely difficult AI problem
Direct exposure to customers and real-world operations
The chance to build technology from the ground up
A role where your work will have a direct impact on the company's success
UK work authorisation required. London-based.
If you're an exceptional ML/AI engineer who wants to work on problems that go beyond another generic AI application, we'd love to hear from you.