Founding Engineer (AI)

Compensation: Up to £120,000 + significant equity

Type: Full‑time

What is DeepFlow?

DeepFlow is the hyperscaling platform. We launch and scale AI-native businesses.

An operator with 10 years of domain expertise pairs with DeepFlow’s platform and engineering support to build a business that would previously have needed a team of 50. You’re building the agents that make it work.

Where we are now

• Platform live with paying customers across law, finance, recruitment, and media
• Launching our founding cohort through DeepFlow Foundry: deploying agents into real revenue‑generating businesses
• Preparing for a significant raise to scale from 2–3 companies to 10+ by September, with a roadmap to 100 in 2027
• Research team published at AAAI 2026 (invited oral) and DAI 2025, with work adopted by top global universities and companies

The Role

You own the agent layer. Every AI workflow that runs on DeepFlow - the scaffolding, the prompts, the tool integrations, the evaluation pipeline - is your responsibility. Your decisions about agent architecture, provider selection, and quality assurance directly determine whether our companies’ AI delivers in production.

This is a software engineering role with an agent specialisation. You’re a full‑stack engineer first - you write backend services, build APIs, and ship features end-to-end. Your focus is the model layer, but you’re not siloed to it.

You work directly with the CTO/CPO and CSO to shape product direction. Significant equity reflects the scope and impact of the position.

What You’ll Build

• Agent Scaffolding: Designing and building the frameworks that connect LLMs into reliable, production‑grade workflows - prompt engineering, tool use, and multi‑step chains that hold up at scale.
• Provider Integration: Working with closed‑source providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.) via OpenRouter. Managing model selection, fallbacks, cost optimisation, and latency across providers.
• Agent Evaluation: Building the eval infrastructure that measures whether agents actually work - regression testing, quality metrics, and structured failure analysis.
• Integration Engineering: Connecting agents to the external world: Slack, GSuite, CRMs, accounting tools, and domain‑specific APIs. The integration layer that makes agents useful in real businesses.
• Full‑Stack Delivery: You write backend services, build API endpoints, and contribute to the frontend when needed. Agents don’t exist in a vacuum - this is still a software engineering role.
• Product Direction: You work closely with the founding team to translate cohort feedback and client needs into agent architecture decisions. What to build matters as much as how you build it.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong software engineer first. You write clean, production‑quality code and you ship fast. Real deployed systems, not notebooks.
• Experience building with closed‑source model providers in production - shipping agent workflows to real users, not just prototyping.
• Practical understanding of prompt engineering, tool use, and agent evaluation. You know what makes an agent reliable versus what makes a good demo.
• Full‑stack capable. Backend (Python), infrastructure basics, and enough frontend (React/TypeScript) to ship features end‑to‑end.
• Fluent with modern AI tooling - you use Cursor, Claude Code, or similar daily and it makes you faster. AI tooling is not optional here.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and startup pace. Priorities shift weekly based on cohort feedback.
• Right to work in the UK permanently.

We care less about

• Your degree (or lack of one)
• How many years you’ve been working - we care about what you’ve shipped
• Whether you’ve published papers - this is an engineering role, not a research role
• Backend & Agents: Python, pydantic‑ai, proprietary agent frameworks, OpenRouter
• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vite
• Infrastructure: AWS (EKS), Docker, Inngest (event‑driven orchestration)

Why Join

• Ownership. Significant equity as a founding engineer. The agents you build power every business on the platform.
• Real traction. Paying customers, founding cohort live, and a significant raise in preparation. What you build in the next 6–12 months directly determines whether we hit 10 companies by September.
• Exceptional team. Co‑founder who sold his AI company to WPP for $100M. Product leader who scaled a Meta platform to 400K+ users. Research team published at top AI venues with work adopted by leading universities and Fortune 500 R&D teams. Advisors include a leading NLP researcher and a Google DeepMind team lead.
• Flexibility. Fully remote, UK timezone. Regular offsites. We care about what you ship, not when you’re online.

We’re hiring immediately. The process is fast: we make offers within one week.

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