Founding Engineer

About the Role

Cara is SocialTalent's AI-powered product for enterprise talent teams. She's already live with customers, and we're looking for a Founding Engineer to lead the next stage of how we build and scale her.

This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who wants more than ownership of a codebase. You'll work directly with our CTPO, and have the freedom to shape Cara's architecture, engineering approach and ultimately the team around it.

We believe AI is changing not only what software can do, but how great software teams should work. We're looking for someone who wants to help prove that.

What you'll do

• Own Cara's technical architecture and direction as the product scales.
• Build and ship — this is a hands-on engineering role as well as a leadership one.
• Shape how we use AI across software development, from agents and automation to evaluation, review and quality.
• Create the tooling and ways of working that allow a small, senior team to deliver exceptional output.
• Work closely across product, customer and engineering decisions.
• Build to an enterprise standard across reliability, security, GDPR, data residency and our SOC 2, ISO 27001 and EU AI Act readiness.
• Help shape and lead the engineering team as Cara grows.

Your Profile

We're less interested in your current title than in what you've built and owned.

You might be a Staff or Principal Engineer, Founding Engineer, Lead Engineer, Product Engineer, technical founder or leading engineering in a smaller technology company.

You'll likely have:

• Strong software engineering and architecture experience, with meaningful ownership of production systems.
• A track record of building and shipping products, ideally in startup, scale-up or 0→1 environments.
• Practical experience using AI to materially change how you build software — not simply using a coding assistant.
• Evidence of creating engineering leverage through tooling, automation, platforms or better ways of working.
• Strong product judgment and an instinct for the customer problem as well as the technical one.
• Experience building serious production software, ideally enterprise B2B SaaS.
• The technical credibility and leadership skills to set standards and bring others with you while remaining close to the work.

Experience with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, enterprise security or regulated AI environments would be an advantage.

Machine-learning research experience isn't required. Cara uses existing models; we don't train them.

Why Us?

You'll be joining at an unusual point: the product is real, the customers are real, but many of the most important engineering decisions are still ahead of us.

SocialTalent is an established Irish technology company with 15 years behind it and secured multi-year Enterprise Ireland RD&I funding behind Cara.

We want to keep the engineering team deliberately small, senior and highly leveraged by AI.

So we're not looking for someone whose ambition is to build the biggest team.

We're looking for someone who wants to build a better way of engineering.

About Social Talent

SocialTalent is helping shape the future of hiring.

For fifteen years, we've helped some of the world's leading organisations build better hiring capability through expert-led learning and hiring best practice. Today, we're taking that expertise further with Cara by SocialTalent - our AI hire who takes on the transactional work of recruiting, alongside our Learning platform, which continues to develop faster, AI-fluent hiring teams. Together, we're helping organisations rethink how hiring work gets done: automating transactional work while enabling people to focus on the work where they add the greatest value.

How we work matters just as much as what we build. Our values, Adapt & Achieve, Connected Collaboration, Dignity & Integrity, and Experiment & Accelerate - shape how we make decisions, work together and continue to evolve.

We are a small, ambitious team, so people at SocialTalent have the opportunity to make a visible contribution. Whether you're building technology, creating content, working with customers or growing the business, you'll be helping us build what's next for SocialTalent and the future of hiring. We value the flexibility of remote working while making time to connect, collaborate and have some fun together through regular company-wide sessions and in-person days.

SocialTalent is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity without unlawful discrimination on the grounds of gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, race or membership of the Traveller community.