Founding AI Engineer / VC Start-Up / Up to £150k + Equity

Founding AI EngineerLondon (Hybrid 4 days on site) | Up to £150,000 + EquityAbout the OpportunityI'm partnering with a venture-backed AI startup that's building technology for some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.Rather than focusing on drug discovery, the business is tackling the operational side of pharma- using AI to automate complex quality, manufacturing and regulatory workflows that are still heavily reliant on manual processes. Their platform helps customers extract insights from vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, streamline decision-making, and reduce the time it takes to bring medicines to patients.Having secured funding from leading investors and signed several enterprise customers, they're now looking to hire a Senior AI Engineer to play a key role in shaping the next phase of the product.The RoleAs one of the early engineering hires, you'll work directly with the founders to build the AI capabilities at the heart of the platform.This is a hands-on role where you'll own problems end-to-end—from designing production-grade LLM systems and agentic workflows to building evaluation frameworks and deploying scalable AI services. You'll have significant influence over both the technical architecture and the direction of the product as the company grows.What You'll Be Working OnThis is a broad role with plenty of ownership, but your day-to-day is likely to include:Designing and building production-ready AI systems using the latest LLMs and agentic frameworks.Developing retrieval and reasoning pipelines across large pharmaceutical and scientific datasets.Building scalable backend services and APIs to support customer-facing AI features.Creating robust evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, reliability and performance.Working closely with customers to understand operational challenges and translate them into production AI solutions.Contributing to engineering best practices and helping shape the technical roadmap as the team scales.What They're Looking ForThe team is looking for someone who enjoys solving difficult engineering problems and has experience shipping AI products into production.You'll likely have:Strong Python experience and a track record of building scalable backend systems.Commercial experience developing AI-powered products using LLMs, RAG and agentic workflows.A solid understanding of model evaluation, observability and production AI infrastructure.Experience working with structured and unstructured data at scale.A pragmatic approach to engineering and the ability to work autonomously in a fast-moving startup environment.A genuine interest in building products that solve meaningful, real-world problems.In return, the business is offering:Up to £150,000 base salaryMeaningful equityHybrid workingThe opportunity to help shape an AI-first product from an early stageA collaborative, high-performing engineering culture with significant ownership from day one