Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer | AI Infrastructure Startup for Biopharma | Full-Time | Up to £150K + Founding Equity

About the Company

Our client is an AI infrastructure company transforming how commercial decisions are made across the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The team unites cutting-edge AI research with decades of pharmaceutical industry leadership in portfolio strategy, competitive intelligence, forecasting, and business development.

Backed by top-tier venture capital, they build forward-deployed systems engineered directly into client environments, pairing high-impact AI capabilities with enterprise-grade data security and governance.

About the Role

Reporting directly to the founders, the Founding Engineer will be a core builder shaping the architectural foundation, data ingestion pipelines, and agentic workflows from the ground up.

This is a high-horsepower, hands-on role designed for an exceptional full-stack/systems builder who can write clean production code across the entire stack, architect reliable data infrastructure, and translate complex client requirements into shipped features.

You will help design the core multi-source ingestion engine, implement autonomous AI agents and structured LLM extraction pipelines, and ensure enterprise-grade security and document traceability across all platform features.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and scale data pipelines that continuously ingest, clean, and process global biopharma data (clinical trial registries, regulatory filings, congress readouts, and market research).
• Implement agentic workflows, inference pipelines, and structured extraction using Pydantic AI and modern foundation models—prioritising absolute document traceability and zero-hallucination accuracy.
• Develop end-to-end capabilities from clean database schemas in PostgreSQL and performant FastAPI endpoints through to responsive Next.js/React frontends.
• Work alongside the co-founders to unpack client requirements, design custom modules to solve specific commercial biopharma workflows, and ship reliable software in fast iteration cycles.
• Maintain SOC 2–aligned cloud architecture on AWS, incorporating fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC), robust test suites, and strict client data isolation.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong end-to-end capabilities spanning Python/FastAPI backend services, PostgreSQL schema design, and modern TypeScript/React interfaces.
• Practical experience integrating LLMs and building AI agents, structured validation (Pydantic / Pydantic AI), and document parsing pipelines where verifiable provenance is critical.
• A strong bias toward shipping; comfortable building 80/20 solutions to validate workflows quickly before hardening them into production-grade infrastructure.
• Confident communication skills, comfortable breaking down complex technical trade-offs and gathering functional requirements directly from non-technical stakeholders.
• Proven ability to rapidly master unfamiliar, complex data spaces (such as clinical trial phases or pharmaceutical licensing structures) and turn them into clean data models.

Qualifications & Experience

• 3-5 years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling production software in modern Python and TypeScript environments.
• Solid experience across the core stack: Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL, TypeScript (Next.js / React), and AWS.
• Practical experience working with LLMs, retrieval systems, and AI agent frameworks in production.
• Strong academic credentials or concrete evidence of top 1% technical ability (e.g., First Class / Distinction degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or Engineering from leading institutions; competitive programming achievements; or standout early-career contributions).
• Prior experience in early-stage startups, forward-deployed engineering, or building data-heavy B2B SaaS products is highly desirable.