Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer London (hybrid, 3 days in office) · Full-time · Competitive salary + early-team equity Join Bite as one of our first engineers. You'll ship across the full stack to paying customers, work directly with the founders, and own real pieces of the knowledge graph that powers everything we build. Why this role is interesting The problem is genuinely hard. When a structural engineer changes Column C7 in their analysis model, the same column exists in drawings, schedules, specs and emails under different names, in different formats, with no shared identifier. Resolving those references into one canonical entity, and telling the engineer exactly what just went out of date, is the core of our product. You'll build on and extend that foundation. Your work ships to people who pay. The platform is in production with signed design partners including some of the UK's leading structural engineering firms. Features go from your branch into the hands of working engineers within days, and you'll hear directly what landed and what didn't. You'll work on the whole product, not a slice of it. We're a small team and we run one focused thing at a time. You'll take features from a conversation with a customer through design, implementation, tests and deployment. No ticket factory, no waiting on three other teams. What we're building Structural engineers work across a fragmented set of tools with no shared source of truth: ETABS models, SAFE analyses, Autodesk drawings, Excel specs, PDFs, emails. When a design changes, propagating that change across files is manual, slow and error-prone, and the errors are expensive. Bite is the change management and audit trail layer for structural engineering. The platform does two things that today take weeks of manual work: natural-language search across a project's entire file ecosystem, and cross-file impact detection. Both run on a single engineering knowledge graph built on content-addressed file storage, per-file structured extraction, and a canonical entity resolver that unifies concepts across file formats. The timing matters too. The Building Safety Act now requires firms to evidence their design decisions, and directors carry personal liability for it. We are building the system of record for that. What a typical week looks like Ship a feature end to end: a Node/TypeScript API change, the React frontend that exposes it, and the tests that prove it works. Pair with El-Amin (our CTO, a former practising structural engineer) on how engineers actually think about a column, a load path, or a revision, then encode that into the data model. Improve extraction or retrieval quality in the Python ML/RAG workers and measure whether it actually got better. Sit in on a design partner call and watch a structural engineer use what you built last week. Make a pragmatic call on tech debt with the team: what we fix now, what we log, and why. You don't need to be expert in every layer. The stack is polyglot by design (TypeScript, Python, React, C#/WPF, Azure) and we care about strong core engineering far more than specific tools. Product sense is not optional AI now writes a meaningful share of the code. What it can't do is decide what's worth building, notice that a feature solves the wrong problem, or sense that a structural engineer will never click that button. We don't have a layer of product managers between you and the customer, and we don't plan to. Every engineer here exercises product judgement daily. If you've ever been frustrated that nobody asked you what should be built, this is the antidote. How you'll grow You'll learn an entire vertical: how structural engineering firms work, how AEC data formats behave, and how to build LLM/RAG systems that hold up in production. You'll work directly with our VP of Engineering and CTO, and as the team grows around you there's a clear path to owning a domain, leading projects, and eventually mentoring the engineers who come after you. What we're looking for 5+ years of experience with a track record of shipping and owning production systems. Strong backend experience, ideally Node.js/TypeScript or Python in a production context, and comfortable reading across other languages (C#, Python or TypeScript). Working knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals: async queues, event-driven workflows. The instinct to keep things simple under pressure, and the judgement to know when a tactical shortcut is right and when it isn't. Genuine product sense. You think about the user before you think about the implementation. Clear communication. We move between deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations every day, and we value clarity above speed. Kindness, curiosity, optimism and drive. We believe in being kind over being nice, we give and receive constructive feedback constantly, and we're building something bigger than ourselves. What will make you stand out LLM/RAG pipelines in production: embeddings, vector search, retrieval quality measurement. Graph-based data models, entity resolution, or knowledge graph tooling. Autodesk Platform Services or AEC data formats (IFC, Revit, ETABS, SAFE or similar). Windows desktop development (.NET / WPF / native integrations). Background in construction, structural engineering software, or document-intensive vertical SaaS. Don't rule yourself out over the stack. We're looking for strong engineers with sound principles. Technologies are tools. How we work We believe in thorough automated testing. Not strict TDD, but every PR ships with the appropriate E2E tests, unit tests or eval harnesses. We own the entire platform, including deployment and reliability, so we control our own CI and CD. The team is autonomous, multi-disciplinary and empowered. The process We respect your time and move fast. You'll hear from us quickly after every stage, and the process is as much about you assessing us as the reverse. Ask us anything. Initial screening call (15 mins) Technical conversation with our VP of Engineering, walking through some of your code (30 mins) Pairing session with the team (1–2 hours) Reference checks and offer About Bite Bite Engineering is an Equal Employment Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other legally protected status. We want people from all walks of life to feel valued for their individuality, thrive in our business and share a sense of belonging. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, let us know.