Founding Senior Product Engineer
Partnering with a well-backed seed-stage AI company in London, Foundation Partners are hiring for several founding Senior Engineers to a technically strong & lean Eng team, shape 'how' in addition to 'what' is built and help the company prepare for the next iteration of their scaling journey.
The Role
This is a full-stack product role with a backend-heavy centre of gravity. You'll own complete product slices end-to-end and you'll ship these without needing to be guided.
You're not a specialist who hands off at the API boundary. You think in user outcomes and delivery units, and you're reliable: your code handles edge cases, your APIs have clean contracts, and the work you ship stays shipped.
What You'll Do
Own product delivery — take features from spec to production, backend-first but covering frontend and integration where needed
Build and maintain backend systems — product APIs, data pipelines, and core infrastructure on our Python/FastAPI/Postgres stack
Build with LLMs and agents — ship product features with significant LLM integration; contribute to the voice agent backend and information extraction systems
Work across the stack — ship workable React/TypeScript frontend for product features; not a frontend specialist, but comfortable and pragmatic
Collaborate with product and design — translate ambiguous requirements into concrete shipped work; be the engineer who unblocks, not the one who waits
Maintain quality at speed — handle data integrity, error paths, API evolution, and operational concerns as a default, not an afterthought
What We're Looking For
Independent delivery - You can own and ship end-to-end product slices with minimal supervision; your track record shows features that shipped, stuck, and scaled
Product trade-off judgment — you balance speed, quality, and user impact under ambiguity; you push back when something is underspecified and make pragmatic calls when it needs to ship
Reliability and API discipline — you handle data integrity, error paths, idempotence, and API versioning as standard practice; production reliability is your default, not a later concern
Cross-functional pragmatism — you work effectively with product and design, can unblock yourself across the stack, and ship workable frontend when that's what's needed
Strong technical depth in:
Python backend (FastAPI or equivalent, async patterns, Postgres, Redis)
LLM integration — building products where AI is in the critical path, not bolted on
API design and data modelling
JavaScript/TypeScript — comfortable enough to ship frontend features and review frontend PRs
Nice to Have
Experience with voice agents or real-time audio pipelines
Familiarity with evals, guardrails, or agent observability
Familiarity with GCP / cloud infrastructure
Experience in recruiting tech, marketplaces, or matching systems
The Stack
A modern Python stack: FastAPI, Postgres, Redis, Docker, Pydantic AI, running on GCP. Frontend in React/TypeScript. We iterate fast and keep the codebase clean.
We'll offer you
Above market salary
Meaningful equity
Full private healthcare & dental
Fertility benefits & enhanced parental support
Gym membership & wellness benefits
LOTS of Claude tokens
Regular socials, offsites and an annual trip
MacBook Pro + team kit
"Whatever you need" approach to tools and support
- Department
- Product & Engineering Roles
- Locations
- London HQ
- Remote status
- Hybrid
About Foundation Partners
A People team built for ambitious businesses
The old model for People & Talent doesn’t work for today's businesses. We've built a better one.
Traditionally, early-stage Founders had two options: handle People & Talent themselves, losing precious time they should be spending on product or go-to-market, or hire a generalist, expected to cover everything from culture to recruitment to performance. We offer a more impactful alternative: A fully flexible, fractional People & Talent team with specialist skillsets and hands-on delivery, ready to start driving impact for your business in weeks, not months.