Founding Research Engineer

Founding Research Engineer

UK-based | Mostly remote | Salary starting at £70,000 + 0.5–1% equity

What can the information companies leave online tell us about what they’ll do next?

We’re working with an early-stage startup exploring that question. Its product collects information from public sources and connects it across businesses, people and events. They’re developing their proprietary prediction capability, testing which patterns provide useful clues about future business activity.

They’re hiring their first dedicated research engineer, joining the CTO and founding engineer as the third person in the technical team.

The work

You’ll shape the research plan alongside the CTO, design experiments and develop models that can be used in the product.

That means connecting historical signals with subsequent outcomes, developing the knowledge graph behind the system, and testing whether new approaches improve prediction quality.

Applied machine learning and data science are the main focus, supported by knowledge graphs and LLM systems. You’ll also contribute to features and help solve wider engineering problems as they arise.

What they’re looking for

• Four or more years of AI/ML industry experience, or equivalent depth through relevant academic research. Candidates coming out of a relevant PhD will be considered.
• Experience in applied machine learning, data science or predictive modelling.
• Strong Python skills for research and implementation.
• A solid approach to evaluation, including baselines, backtesting, calibration and keeping future information out of training data.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, graph databases, entity resolution or related methods.
• Experience working with temporal, event-based or noisy real-world data.
• Familiarity with embeddings, semantic retrieval and LLM systems.
• The engineering skills to turn experiments into working software.
• Comfort taking ownership, making decisions and raising risks when the route forward isn’t fully defined.

Experience predicting rare or low-frequency events would be useful. Fraud, risk, churn and forecasting are all relevant examples. Neo4j, previous startup experience and broader full-stack engineering would also be welcome.

The setup

• £70,000 base salary starting point
• 0.5–1% equity, with detailed terms to be discussed.
• UK-based, with the technical team currently working almost entirely remotely.
• Occasional in-person UK meetups and travel to Norway roughly three times a year.
• A more regular hybrid arrangement may follow as the UK team grows.

Interested? Send me your CV and, if you have one, a project or research link that shows the kind of work you’d bring to the role.