Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform

What this is

A seed-stage company building AI-native risk infrastructure for regulated enterprises. Banks, hospitals, insurers. They need a platform that's secure, compliant, and trustable enough to win multi-year contracts, not just pilot projects.

Four people on the engineering team. You would be the fifth.

They hit seven-figure revenue within months of launch, closed an oversubscribed seed round, and are tracking toward Series A. This is not a pre-revenue bet.

What you'll actually do

- Own the backend services end to end: architecture, build, deployment, operation
- Design and manage the infrastructure layer: Azure, Terraform, CI/CD
- Build multi-tenant isolation across compute, data, and network layers
- Implement compliance controls for SOC 2 and ISO 27001
- Ship product features alongside infrastructure work. You are not just the infra person
- Work directly with the founding team on architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and what to build next
- Use AI tooling (Claude Code, etc.) as a force multiplier in your daily workflow

Who you are

You are a CTO-level engineer who wants to go back to being an IC. You think about architecture, users, and shipping in equal measure. You've built production systems that needed to be both fast and auditable, and you understand why those two things sometimes conflict.

What you need to have

1. 6+ years of backend engineering experience with clear infrastructure ownership
2. Production experience with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines
3. Strong professional TypeScript or Node.js experience
4. You've designed and implemented compliance controls (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and security posture (IAM, network segmentation)
5. You're based in London or willing to relocate on-site

What I'll lean toward (but won't require)

- Azure experience (Container Apps, Service Bus, Front Door, Entra ID)
- You've designed multi-tenant SaaS isolation before
- You've built production LLM platforms, RAG systems, or agentic workflows
- Entrepreneurial signals: side projects, former founder, technical talks

What doesn't fit this role

- Current or recent DevRel or DevEx roles
- Pure front-end engineering without backend and infrastructure scope
- Pure cybersecurity specialists without product engineering experience
- Big-company engineers who've never owned production in a startup context

Interview process

1. Behavioural phone screen with the founder
2. Technical phone screen
3. Paid 1-day on-site work trial (GBP 1,000/day)

No take-home assignments. No whiteboard algorithms. You'll do real work with the team.

The criteria I screen CVs for

1. Have you owned infrastructure (Terraform, CI/CD) in a production environment for 2+ years, not just set it up once?
2. Can you point to a system where you designed and implemented compliance or security controls (SOC 2, ISO 27001, IAM, network segmentation)?
3. Is your core backend language TypeScript, Node.js, or Go, and have you shipped customer-facing features in it, not just internal tooling?
4. Is there evidence of startup-style ownership: making architecture tradeoffs, shipping under constraints, operating what you built?