Senior Founding Engineer – AI Learning Platform

Location: Hybrid (UK preferred) Reporting to: Head of Engineering Key Partners: Kim Faura (Product Lead) & Pravin Paratey (Head of Engineering) The Split: 80% Deep Building & Coding | 20% Technical Leadership & Team Shielding ABOUT SALESAPE & ABI We are building what we believe will become the operating system for millions of small businesses. Today, we have one main product brand — SalesApe, which helps businesses automate customer conversations, qualify incoming leads, and convert more sales. Alongside this, we are building Self-Serve Abi (Artificial Business Intelligence) — a natural language AI business partner that allows business owners to create, operate, and grow their businesses simply by talking to an AI. But our long-term vision goes far beyond individual AI agents. We believe the next generation of software will continuously learn from the outcomes it creates. Every customer interaction, recommendation, experiment, and business outcome should make the platform smarter for the next customer. To achieve that, we're looking for a Senior Founding Engineer to build the core intellectual property that ties these products together: our unified, self-improving Learning Platform. THE MISSION Your mission is to architect and build the intelligence layer that sits behind both SalesApe and Self-Serve Abi. This platform will capture business events, measure outcomes, identify patterns, and continuously improve the recommendations our AI makes. Rather than simply orchestrating existing foundational models, you will build a self-improving recommendation and learning engine that compounds over time. Imagine millions of businesses collectively teaching the platform: which sales techniques convert best, which marketing campaigns actually work, and which onboarding journeys reduce churn. Every customer benefits from the learnings generated by every other customer, strictly preserving privacy and security. This is not a theoretical academic exercise. We will frame your first phase deliberately: prove the learning loop end-to-end on one real, high-value problem—onboarding and retention—using the outcome data we are already generating, from our early trust and engagement signals to the events pipeline and retention dashboard. A concrete early win on a problem we genuinely care about earns us the right, and the real-world data, to tackle the harder architectural questions. From there, you scale and compound the same loop across the rest of the product. This approach drives immediate product value while we build toward the multi-year strategic defensibility moat we need ahead of our Series B. WHAT THIS ROLE ACTUALLY IS (AND ISN'T) We are not looking for an "ivory tower" architect or a hands-off engineering manager. We need a highly skilled, pragmatic engineer who is still deeply in love with writing code and shipping systems. We are setting a clear goal—own a learning system that gives our agents opinionated, evidence-backed workflows—and trusting you to own the how. That explicitly includes challenging our assumptions and weighing alternative approaches to get there: we want the strongest architecture, not a predetermined one. The role is split into two primary responsibilities: - 80% Engineering & Building: You will spend the vast majority of your time architecting, writing, and shipping production-ready code. You will inherit a seeded prototype of our knowledge layer and harden it into a robust, scalable, and resilient production platform. - 20% Technical Leadership & Shielding: You will partner closely with the Senior Leadership Team to ruthlessly prioritize the technical roadmap. You will guide other engineers on architectural standards and act as a protective buffer—keeping them safe from the daily "noise" of a fast-growing startup so they can focus on deep, uninterrupted builder mode. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD You will design, own, and scale the architecture behind a continuously learning platform. Specific areas of focus include: - Event…