Founding AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer London - Hybrid (1 day per week in the office) £120,000–£150,000 base + founding equity ByteSearch is supporting an early-stage AI startup hiring its first engineer to work alongside the CTO. The company is raising its seed round. This is an opportunity to help establish the engineering foundations, influence the product and take substantial ownership from the outset. You'll work across the software stack, building AI capabilities alongside the backend services and user-facing features needed to bring them into production. The role will suit someone who enjoys working closely with a founder, making technical decisions and turning ideas into working software. We're particularly interested in people who:

• Have strong software engineering experience and production Python skills
• Have hands-on experience building AI agents, including orchestration and tool calling
• Can evaluate AI outputs and improve their accuracy and reliability
• Are comfortable working across backend systems and frontend interfaces
• Learn quickly and make sensible decisions when requirements are still evolving
• Take ownership of features from initial design through to deployment Experience building products in an early-stage environment would be useful, as would familiarity with retrieval systems and data-processing pipelines. You'll have considerable influence over the architecture, development practices and future engineering function, with equity as part of the package. Applications and introductions will be handled confidentially by ByteSearch.