Founding Engineer

Engineering · London

At Catapult, you’ll help build the knowledge work agent capable of handling the most challenging and ambitious work, end to end. You’ll join our small, obsessed team of repeat founders, researchers and engineers from Meta, Amazon Research, G-Research, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, and help transform how the world works.

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Catapult team members working with laptops in the office

The role

The Founding Engineer is in the ultimate cross-sectional position, and will be involved in solving tough algorithmic problems, managing the entire tech stack, and building products end-to-end.

This will include building highly performant desktop applications, both frontend and backend, and (most critically) developing and designing the very complex systems we use to manage, ingest, and process enormous amounts of personal data and serve agentic interactions. This means tackling some of the toughest engineering problems around (think early-stage Google!).

The role the Founding Engineer plays is limited only by their ability and ambition. The successful candidate must be an especially fast learner and problem solver with the ability to recognise and solve, or learn to solve, almost any problem that may arise.

You’ll love this role if you enjoy…

Identifying and solving very challenging technical and research-level problems, and working independently to solve them.
Building products and taking complete ownership end-to-end, from designing complex and computationally heavy backend systems, all the way to UI/UX problems on the front end.
Learning new areas insanely quickly, and then getting stuck in. This may include, for example, understanding some new re-ranker, embedding model, memory system, or new area of research, and then participating both in its development and how we scale and include it in the product.
Helping identify and tackle any technical challenges that may emerge.

Requirements and experience

5+ years of experience working on very challenging projects or very strong evidence of exceptional ability and decision-making with slightly less experience.
A strong track record of solving difficult problems in either an academic or industrial setting.
Clear evidence of the ability to design and develop complex and computationally heavy backend systems. You should be a trusted voice in the room, with us being able to completely rely on your judgement and implementation.
Strong programming skills, ideally in Python, TypeScript and/or Rust/C++.
A strong track record displaying the ability to manage engineering workflows, such as building robust and scalable products, and ideally also managing scientific processes, such as forming and testing hypotheses.
Experience working with cloud infrastructure providers and database technologies, e.g. SQL/no-SQL, Kubernetes (or similar containerised environments), etc.
Ability to self-organise and work independently.

Nice to haves

Experience working with NLP/LLMs or other AI/ML.
An ML, statistics, or mathematics background or experience.
Major work on infrastructure-heavy projects, such as complex data pipelines.
Work building desktop applications or front ends.
Experience working on open-source projects, an interesting side project, or contributing to Stack Exchange or similar.

What we offer

Competitive salary and truly generous stock options.
Comprehensive Bupa Private Healthcare and wellbeing allowances.
A tax-efficient pension scheme with salary sacrifice.
Generous workplace nursery benefit.
34 days of paid holiday, including public holidays.
Work-visa sponsorship so you can come build with us in person in London.
All the equipment you need to perform at your very best.