Platform Engineer

Lead Platform Engineer, NestJS / Agentic AI, Westminster, London KEY POINTS

• Lead Platform Engineer at a seed stage AI startup automating the operational side of UK lettings and estate agencies
• £110,000 to £150,000 base plus equity
• Full time, permanent, onsite 4 days a week in Westminster, London
• NestJS and Node.js backend, Next.js frontend, monorepo deployed into microservices
• Google Cloud and Kubernetes, with Postgres, MongoDB and Qdrant
• Agentic AI at the core of the product and of how the team builds, Claude Code used every day
• Lead a small team while staying the strongest builder in the room
• Reporting to the Head of Engineering, with direct access to the founders
• Right to work in the UK required, no sponsorship available WHAT YOU WOULD ACTUALLY BE BUILDING Our client is building the AI system of action for UK lettings and estate agencies. It sits on top of the agency's CRM and runs the operational work: prospecting, viewings, maintenance, compliance and arrears. A lot of that work runs through their voice agent, which picks up the phone when the branch can't. Every call it handles has to turn into real action in the agency's systems, reliably, across every agency on the platform. The platform is built to run agents, not just respond to them. That is the part you would own. WHY THE ARCHITECTURE LOOKS LIKE IT DOES A voice agent handling live calls needs backend systems that respond in real time and don't drop work. That is why this is event driven microservices, deployed from a monorepo onto Kubernetes on Google Cloud. The product runs on agentic pipelines. You will know from experience what breaks in those at scale, and how to build systems that hold up when they do. THE ROLE You will work under the Head of Engineering and own the build across the stack, end to end, from architecture through to production.
• Architect, design and build scalable backend systems and APIs
• Design and maintain microservice and event driven architectures behind the voice agent's real time workflows
• Lead a small team of engineers, drive their delivery, review their work and be accountable for what ships
• Set the standard for how the team builds with agentic AI, from Claude Code workflows to the patterns everyone adopts
• Shape technical strategy with the Head of Engineering: what gets built, how, and what doesn't get built yet
• Keep systems secure, performant and maintainable, with reliable data pipelines as the business scales
• Get close to the product and understand the lettings workflows being automated WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE Month 1: you know the stack deeply and have shipped something meaningful Month 3: you own a major part of the system, lead a small team on it, and have introduced at least one agentic practice that speeds everyone up Month 6: you are the go to engineer for the hardest problems and have set the agentic development standard Month 12: the platform scales to every UK agency that needs it, and a meaningful part of that architecture and team is yours ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCE
• 5 to 8+ years of hands on software engineering, ideally in AI, SaaS or automation platforms
• A first class degree from a Russell Group university, or a 2:1 from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL or Warwick, in Computer Science, Engineering, Maths or a related field
• Already a lead engineer, or very close to it, having owned the technical direction of real projects
• Deep Node.js and NestJS, with strong experience building RESTful APIs and microservice based systems
• Real experience building with LLMs and agents in production, using Claude Code and agentic workflows as standard
• A startup or 0 to 1 background, or a standout record at a top firm, making the right call without a committee
• Right to work in the UK, no sponsorship available
• Able to work onsite in Westminster 4 days a week NICE TO HAVE
• Next.js and frontend experience
• Google Cloud and Kubernetes
• Vector databases such as Qdrant
• Voice or real time conversational AI SALARY AND BENEFITS
• £110,000 to £150,000 base, depending on experience
• Equity
• Real technical ownership from day one
• Direct access to the founders
• Permanent, full time, onsite 4 days a week in Westminster TO APPLY Please apply via this advert or email Daniel.Jones@searchability.com directly. For further information, call 0203 763 3888 or 07704 152 638. By applying, you consent to us processing and submitting your application (subject to suitability) for this vacancy only.