Founding Applied AI Engineer

Founding Applied AI / Systems EngineerLocation: London, UK - Hybrid (3x on-site)Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equityThe companyWe’re partnering with an early-stage AI company developing autonomous testing infrastructure for interactive digital worlds.The team is tackling a growing mismatch within the games industry. Games have become vast, dynamic systems containing countless devices, configurations and player journeys, but testing still depends heavily on people repeatedly working through the same flows under intense release pressure.The company is building vision-driven agents capable of observing gameplay, deciding what to do, taking actions and recovering when an environment behaves unpredictably. Its goal is not to remove human judgement from quality assurance. It is to give QA teams machine-scale coverage while allowing people to focus on exploration, creativity and the subtle issues that require genuine player empathy.Despite being early in its journey, the company has built differentiated technology, gained commercial traction and partnered with prominent game studios. It is supported by recognised investors and leading AI and startup programmes.Games are the first - and arguably one of the hardest - environments in which to prove the technology. The broader ambition is to create general agents that can operate across applications, enterprise software and websites before eventually extending the underlying systems into robotics.The opportunityThis founding-level role owns the point at which AI models stop predicting and begin taking reliable action.You’ll turn multimodal intelligence into production agents that can tap, swipe, click, navigate and verify user journeys across Android, iOS and PC environments. The role sits at the intersection of applied AI, automation and deep systems engineering.The central challenge is reliability. A strong demo is not enough: agents must function across different devices, operating-system versions, aspect ratios, network conditions and inconsistent loading behaviour. They need to recognise when something has gone wrong, recover intelligently and continue operating without supervision.Your systems will test real products, identify real bugs and influence how an entire industry approaches quality assurance.What you’ll be doingBuild end-to-end agents that connect visual perception and game state to concrete actions such as taps, swipes and clicks.Design robust observe–decide–act–recover loops rather than brittle, pre-recorded scripts.Develop cross-device automation that works across mobile and desktop environments.Enable complex user journeys to run across different devices, operating systems and aspect ratios without depending on fixed coordinates or hard-coded timings.Automate critical flows including tutorials, purchases, onboarding and core gameplay loops.Work with low-level video streaming, device infrastructure, automation platforms and infrastructure as code.Instrument, debug and improve agents operating under slow networks, variable load times, unstable SDKs and other real-world conditions.Establish internal evaluations and production standards for agent performance and reliability.Work directly with QA and engineering leaders at game studios to understand their workflows.Translate ambiguous customer problems into dependable automation and influence the product roadmap.What we’re looking forExperience building vision-driven or multimodal agents using video—not solely text or static images.A strong computer-vision foundation and familiarity with Vision-Language Models or related multimodal architectures.Experience delivering meaningful automation in messy, stateful environments such as mobile applications, browser automation, robotics, autonomous systems, device farms or complex user interfaces.An understanding of closed-loop agent systems that observe, reason, act, validate outcomes and recover from failure.Strong systems-engineering instincts and an obsessive approach to reliability, instrumentation and debugging.Experience owning automation that other teams rely on in production.The ability to work comfortably across AI models, control logic, infrastructure and product engineering.Confidence working directly with customers and converting loosely defined operational pain into practical technical solutions.Experience in a zero-to-one AI product environment, or a strong appetite for the ownership and ambiguity that comes with one.An interest in games or other complex interactive systems is helpful, although deep gaming knowledge is not required.Why join?Build autonomous agents that take real actions in live environments.Solve difficult problems across applied AI, automation, infrastructure and systems engineering.Own systems from initial architecture through to production reliability.Work directly with founders, customers and engineering leaders at major studios.Influence both the technical foundations and product direction of an early-stage company.Join a high-trust environment where strong ideas can ship quickly.Receive meaningful equity and share in the value you help create.Flexible working hours and a culture focused on impact rather than process.Please apply directly here or email your CV over to adam.lockett@sr2rec.co.uk