Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform | London
6 days ago
Stevenage
Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform | London C&D Talent AdvisoryStevenage, United Kingdom This is a role that TechTree is recruiting for on behalf of one of its clients. TechTree is an AI-driven recruitment platform working with high-growth companies. When you apply, TechTree's AI Agent matches you not just to this role, but to other relevant opportunities across its network, so one application can unlock multiple roles. • Location: King's Cross, London, • Work model: On-site by default, with some flexibility, • Employment: Full-time, • Level: Mid-Senior / Founding Engineer, • Experience: 6+ years, • Environment: Seed-stage, high-growth startup, • Join a seed-stage company building AI-native risk infrastructure for regulated enterprises, • Build systems used by customers across financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare, • Own both core backend services and the infrastructure foundations they run on, • Shape a platform where security, compliance, reliability, and enterprise trust are critical to winning customers, • Work directly on architecture that supports multi-year enterprise deployments, • Operate with founding-team levels of ownership and autonomy, • Partner closely with company leadership on technical direction and platform evolution, • Build and own backend services across the platform, • Develop APIs, asynchronous workflows, and core data models, • Design and maintain cloud infrastructure foundations, • Own Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, • Design secure multi-tenant isolation across compute, data, and network layers, • Own deployment pipelines and CI/CD infrastructure, • Build and maintain observability systems, • Establish and improve production on-call practices, • Develop infrastructure for long-running AI agent workloads, • Build systems for large-scale document processing, • Design secure execution environments for AI tools and agents, • Automate compliance evidence collection, • Build infrastructure supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar frameworks, • Develop internal tooling that allows engineers to ship quickly without compromising security or reliability, • 6+ years of backend engineering experience, • Significant infrastructure ownership in production environments, • Strong professional experience with a backend programming language, • Strong TypeScript or Node.js experience preferred, • Production experience with Terraform, • Strong CI/CD experience, • Experience with containerized production workloads, • Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, • Experience owning systems through deployment and production operations, • Strong security fundamentals, • Experience with IAM and access-control architecture, • Experience with network segmentation, • Strong understanding of secrets management, • Awareness of software supply-chain security, • Experience designing and implementing compliance controls, • Hands-on ownership of SOC 2, ISO 27001, or comparable compliance programs, • Operational maturity from supporting production systems that matter, • Ability to balance rapid product delivery with security and reliability requirements, • High level of autonomy and technical ownership, • Compute isolation, • Data isolation, • Network isolation, • GitHub Actions, • Docker, • AKS, • Production-grade AI infrastructure, • LLM platforms, • RAG systems, • Agentic workflows, • Secure AI tool execution, • Former founder or technical founder, • Former CTO returning to an individual-contributor role, • Founding or early-stage engineering experience, • History of owning architecture as well as implementation, • Experience shipping backend systems directly used by customers, • Startup-style production ownership, • Side projects or evidence of independent technical building, • Technical talks, open-source work, or other evidence of deep engineering interest, • Experience working in environments where reliability and compliance directly affect commercial outcomes, • Comfortable using AI coding tools such as Claude Code or equivalent, • Have primarily front-end engineering experience, • Have worked exclusively in cybersecurity without hands-on product engineering, • Have primarily Developer Relations or Developer Experience experience, • Have spent your career only on internal tooling without customer-facing product impact, • Have limited experience operating production systems, • Have no practical Infrastructure as Code or CI/CD experience, • Have only participated in compliance processes rather than designing and implementing controls, • Prefer highly specialized infrastructure work without broader product ownership, • Prefer large-company structures with narrowly defined responsibilities, • Are not comfortable working primarily on-site in London, • Founding-level technical ownership, • Direct impact on which enterprise customers the company can support, • Opportunity to build secure, production-grade AI infrastructure from an early stage, • Exposure to complex enterprise security and compliance requirements, • Close collaboration with company leadership, • Top-decile London market compensation, • Meaningful EMI-eligible equity, • Strong AI tooling and API budgets, • Daily team lunch, • Specialty coffee, • King's Cross office with roof terrace and on-site facilities, • High-autonomy engineering environment, • Opportunity to build both product and infrastructure systems end-to-end #J-18808-Ljbffr