Founding Engineer / Engineering Lead

You’ll be one of the key people building Archways at an early stage, with unusually broad ownership across the product, technical direction and how our engineering team operates.

This is a hands-on engineering role, but not a narrow one. You’ll help translate company and customer priorities into what we build, make important product and technical decisions, and take ownership of getting them shipped.

You’ll work closely with our CTO/co-founder, who has built systems at global scale at Meta and Snap, particularly on architecture and complex technical decisions.

AI is materially changing how software teams should operate. Very small teams of strong engineers can now build far more than traditional engineering models assume. That makes understanding the problem, making good technical and product decisions, coordinating work well and knowing where deep technical expertise really matters increasingly important.

About Archways

Archways helps large enterprises decide what software and AI to buy, build and keep.

Companies already run thousands of applications, and AI is rapidly increasing the number of options available to them. Yet decisions about what to adopt, renew, replace or build are still fragmented across IT, procurement, finance and architecture. Archways brings that context together with market intelligence to help teams make faster, better-evidenced technology decisions.

We’re already working with large organisations across the UK, US and Europe, and the platform is SOC 2 Type II compliant. We were named BT’s AI ProcureTech Startup of the Year. Our ambition is to become the decision layer for enterprise technology and, as software increasingly becomes a workforce of applications and AI agents, help companies decide what that AI workforce should consist of.

What you’ll do

• Build and ship core product and platform capabilities
• Turn customer and company priorities into a practical engineering plan, owning scope, sequencing and delivery
• Work directly with enterprise customers to understand technical needs, feasibility and trade-offs
• Turn what we learn from individual customers into scalable product rather than unnecessary one-off development
• Contribute to architecture and platform decisions alongside the CTO
• Help maintain a reliable, secure and maintainable enterprise platform
• Use AI-native development tools heavily and help us rethink how a small engineering team should operate

What we’re looking for

You might currently be a senior engineer, tech lead, founding engineer or engineering lead.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Is a strong hands-on engineer with good architectural judgement and experience shipping B2B or enterprise software
• Is comfortable with significant autonomy and ambiguity
• Has a strong sense of ownership. You won’t wait for perfectly defined requirements or see your responsibility as ending when the code ships. You’ll identify what needs to happen, make good decisions with imperfect information and help drive it through
• Enjoys the pace of an early-stage company and is highly resourceful. You’re comfortable moving between architecture, product, customers and whatever else is necessary to get an important problem solved
• Moves easily between customer problems, product thinking and engineering
• Is strong at planning and prioritisation and enjoys keeping complex work moving
• Enjoys working directly with customers and understanding how software is used in practice
• Uses AI-assisted development heavily and has a view on how it should change software engineering

Experience building enterprise IT software would be especially valuable, for example IT management, ServiceNow, SaaS management, enterprise architecture, security, procurement, FinOps or infrastructure tooling. We care more about understanding the problems of enterprise technology teams than about a particular company on your CV.

Why join now

We’re early enough that there is still a huge amount to shape, but far enough along that you’ll be building against real enterprise customers and real technology decisions. The next stage is about turning those early deployments into a product and technical foundation that can support many more customers, decisions and use cases. You’ll have substantial influence over the product, architecture and how we build an unusually small, high-output, AI-native engineering team.