Lead Software Engineer

The role

We're a well-funded startup using AI to decrease risk and grow margin in the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Our current focus is general contractors. When they bid to build a major project, such as a skyscraper or an airport, they price millions of pounds' worth of project risks, and treatments for them, by hand, and often inaccurately. During delivery, risk treatments that were suboptimal or never applied erode the margin. Despite billions in annual revenue, contractors only keep ~2%. Bite puts contractors' data to work at tender and through delivery, so the bid price rests on evidence and the margin predicted at tender is the margin realised.

You'll lead engineering at Bite, setting the technical direction, staying hands-on in the code, and building the team that ships it. You'll work closely with Phil Cowans, our fractional CTO, who co-founded Songkick and Nested as CTO and studied Bayesian machine learning at Cambridge (the maths behind probabilistic risk pricing). The platform is in production on a Python backend and a React/TypeScript frontend on Azure. You don't need experience in construction or in our stack. We hire for engineering judgement, and the team treat specific technologies as tools for tackling problems.

Why join Bite

The problem is genuinely hard. A tender pack is thousands of pages of drawings, specifications, contracts and bills of quantities, with a tight deadline for bids. Turning it into a structured risk register, then into a defensible bid price checked against similar completed internal and external projects, is the core of our product. Every number has to show its working, because contractors won't trust things they can't interrogate and deeply understand.

You'll own engineering outright, not a slice of it. There's no engineering organisation to inherit and no layer of management to negotiate with. What exists today is a working platform and a small team; the architecture, standards, hiring bar and the shape of the function as it grows are yours to decide.

You'll build it in the room with the customer. We're co-developing the product on real data with some of the world's largest general contractors. You'll hear what works and what doesn't directly from bid and risk teams.

What we're building

Today, contractors set the risk premium on instinct: a top-50 risk register in Excel, scored by hand, with treatments that are often suboptimal and rarely followed through. Decades of completed-project data sit in archives that are never really used, and nine in ten construction projects still run over budget or schedule.

Bite ingests the whole tender pack, auto-builds the risk register for the team to review, and prices it with Monte Carlo simulation reconciled against a reference class of similar completed projects. Through delivery, an AI auditor tracks risks and treatments, and every completed project improves the next tender.

What you'll do

• Own the technical direction of the platform, from tender-pack ingestion to the risk engine, and write and review code on the critical path yourself.

• Turn messy tender packs and contractors' project archives into structured, citable data the risk model can trust.

• Take the risk model from research to production with Phil: reference class forecasting, Monte Carlo pricing, and the evals proving accuracy.

• Hire and grow the engineering team, and set the bar every subsequent hire is measured against.

• Establish how engineering operates as it scales: standards, code review, release, on-call, and how work gets prioritised.

What we need from you

• A love of learning a new domain, and shipping something quickly that actually fixes what was broken.

• A track record of shipping and owning production systems end to end. Years matter less to us than evidence you've done it.

• Experience hiring, growing and leading a small engineering team.

• Strong backend depth, ideally Python in production, and comfortable working across a React/TypeScript frontend.

• Experience owning architecture for data-heavy systems: ingestion pipelines, queues, workers and storage.

• Experience putting LLM or ML features into production, and measuring whether they're actually right.

• Genuine product sense so you can independently weigh technical trade-offs against customer value.

• The instinct to keep things simple under pressure, and the judgement to know when a tactical shortcut is right and when it isn't.

• Clear communication across deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations. Contractors buy outputs they can audit, so explaining the working matters.

What will make you stand out

• Probabilistic modelling or forecasting in production: Monte Carlo simulation, reference class forecasting, regression on messy real-world data.

• Structured extraction from long, document-heavy inputs such as contracts, specifications and drawings.

• Per-client or on-premise deployment for enterprise customers with sensitive data.

• Background in construction, tendering, estimating, cost or risk management, or document-intensive vertical SaaS.

Don't rule yourself out over the stack. We're looking for a strong engineer with sound principles. Technologies are tools.

What you can expect from us

• Early-team equity: the numbers on the table at the first conversation.

• A seat at the table on product direction: how the risk model works, and what we build next, are still being decided.

• A supportive team: founders who want to be argued with and nobody between you and shipping.

• A domain you'll learn deeply: how contractors price and manage risk, and how AI and statistical models hold up against real project outcomes.

• Direct access to customers: you'll be invited to all product discovery calls.

• Tight feedback loops: you'll see how a change performs on real customer data within days.

• A clear path to CTO: we'll agree up front what it takes to own the whole domain.

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, and for the risk model, backtests against completed projects are how we know a change made it better. We own the entire platform including its deployment and reliability, so we control our own CI and CD. We work discovery first, prototype second, on real customer data within days. The team is autonomous, multi-disciplinary and empowered, and works on one focused thing at a time. It's your call if you'd like to change any of this.

Inclusion at 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.