Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer (London Startups | £100k–£200k + meaningful equity)

London (on-site / hybrid)

Title: Founding Engineer

Location: London (on-site / hybrid)

Salary: £90,000 – £180,000 plus meaningful equity

Dex is an intelligent recruiter that helps you run your job search. Tell Dex about your experience, what you want to build or solve, and your non-negotiables — we only surface the handful of roles genuinely worth your time, and manage the applications on your behalf.

Interested? Apply now by connecting your LinkedIn to Dex.

Picking the right founding role is mostly about picking the right founders, and that's hard to judge from a job ad. We know the early-stage founders we work with personally — what they're building, how they're funded, what they're like to work for — across agentic AI, compliance, foundation models for physics and more. So when we show you a founding seat, it's because we'd take the bet ourselves.

The opportunities

Salaries run £90k–£180k with equity that's meant to matter — this is where the upside can dwarf the base. You'd be one of the first engineers in the building, owning whole domains from architecture to ship and setting the engineering culture alongside the founders. The pace is exactly what you'd expect this early. The ceiling is the point.

You could work on

• Building the product from the ground up with the founders
• Owning entire domains end-to-end, architecture through to ship
• Setting the engineering culture and standards from day one
• Wearing whatever hat the week requires, and shaping what gets built

You may have

• Strong generalist engineering and a builder's instinct
• Comfort with ambiguity and an early-stage pace
• The appetite for the whole problem, not a slice of it
• Prior founding or early-startup experience — a bonus, not a requirement

Why apply through Dex? We put you in front of the right founders with a proper introduction, not a cold application — and you stay in control of what moves forward.

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