Founding Engineer

Founding Backend Engineer – Real-Time Operations Platform 🚀Role Shape:Full ownership of the backend behind a real-time and forward scheduling platform, including the multi-tenant architecture required to support new sites and customers at scale.Environment: Python, Postgres, AWS, event-driven services, state machines, third-party operational integrations, TypeScript frontend contract, technical hiring, on-site deployment and customer management.Experience: Minimum 3 years building and running production backend systems.Practical reality: Direct customer contact, time embedded in live operations from day one, meaningful founding equity, coding credits, London-based, remote only by exception, UK work authorization preferred.The ProblemCritical infrastructure, transportation and logistics may look organized from the outside, but behind the scenes they often rely on radios, spreadsheets, emails, paper manifests, phone calls and constant improvisation.Plans are built statically for operations that change by the minute: delays, location changes, sick calls, broken equipment and knock-on effects across the system. Humans cannot reliably manage this complexity at operating speed, so teams compensate with overstaffing and operational slack, and still miss resources when they matter most.What We're BuildingThe platform builds the plan before operations begin, then turns it into live control as the day unfolds.Using algorithms, stateful systems and agentic AI, it continuously recomputes the best allocation of tasks, staff, equipment, locations and time as conditions change.In aviation, this means replacing spreadsheets, radios, fixed teams and human heroics with intelligent, real-time coordination at the turnaround. ✈️The technology is finally good enough to rethink how these operations work.The Technical ChallengeThis is a coordination platform, not a tool for a single industry.The backend operates two loops over a domain-independent model of tasks, resources, events, constraints and plans:A reactive loop that keeps live operational state accurate as events arrive.A forward scheduler that produces the plan before a shift starts.The reality is messy. Events arrive late, out of order and duplicated. Upstream feeds disconnect and replay. Multiple operators modify overlapping state simultaneously.You'll tackle problems including exactly-once effects on at-least-once delivery, concurrent-write conflict resolution, bounded read latency, state consistency and zero-downtime deployments.The bigger platform challenge is handling variation. Every site, customer and eventually industry brings different source systems, event feeds, communication channels, labour rules and definitions of a task — often on infrastructure outside your control.The goal is simple but difficult: a new deployment should be configuration and data, not another branch of the codebase. Adding another vertical shouldn't require building a second system.That places serious demands on the schema, integration layer and tenant isolation as deployments, throughput and concurrent operators grow. ⚙️What We're Looking ForYou'll own the backend end to end, including:Data modelling, event ingestion and third-party integrationsState machines, APIs and real-time frontend deliveryMulti-tenant architectureReliability of software that live operations depend onThe contract consumed by the TypeScript frontendEngineering standards across testing, staging, deployments, observability and on-callThis is a founding engineering role. You'll go on site, understand how the operation actually works and translate those lessons directly into the product. You'll work with customers and help hire the engineers who follow you.We're looking for 3+ years building and operating production backends, with strong Python and relational modelling skills in Postgres.You should have practical experience with concurrency, event ordering, idempotency and failure recovery, be comfortable with AWS and be willing to own systems in production.Experience with multi-tenant SaaS, event-driven architectures, distributed systems or integrations with difficult legacy systems is highly relevant. The frontend is TypeScript, so you should be comfortable reasoning across that boundary without needing to own it.Above all, we're looking for highly agentic engineers who move without waiting for instructions, enjoy difficult technical problems and maintain high standards when systems are live and the stakes are real.Salary is not a constraint for the right person. The role includes meaningful founding equity and coding credits.📍 London-based | Remote only by exception | UK work authorization preferred