Senior Software Engineer — Founding Engineer

Location: Central London (on-site)
Employment: Full-time hybrid
Visa: Candidates must have existing UK work authorization.
Relocation support not offered.

About the Company
A family-owned real estate developer owner and operator specialising in hotels and student housing in Central London. 3bn portfolio 4.0 million sq ft delivered. The company invests its own equity controls delivery end-to-end and operates what it builds spanning boutique hotels partnerships with major international hotel brands and purpose-built student accommodation. The business is now investing in the technology foundation that will let it scale faster across investment development planning and operations.

The Role
This is the first dedicated engineering hire for a 3bn real estate platform. The role exists to build the companys technology foundation from the ground up taking internal MVPs to production-grade systems and integrating AI to scale operations across investment development and planning. Youll be building the engine for a well-funded fast-growing business with no inherited tech debt as the sole technical owner working directly with senior leadership.

What Youll Do
Own architecture infrastructure and end-to-end delivery for the companys core systems backend services a modern frontend and cloud infrastructure (AWS Azure or GCP) provisioned via Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform Bicep or CDK).
Take existing internal MVPs to production-grade reliable systems.
Design build and deploy AI/LLM-powered workflows that are actively used to drive real business decisions across investment development planning and operations.
Work directly with senior leadership to translate the needs of non-technical
stakeholders (finance investment operations) into technical solutions.
Build the entire tech function from scratch as the first and initially only engineer.

Who Were Looking For
We need a senior autonomous full-stack engineer with 46 years of experience ideally from a high-growth startup with a proven track record of taking products from zero to production and strong ownership over architecture infrastructure and delivery.

Required:
Experience as a founding or very early engineer at a startup.
Portfolio demonstrating end-to-end ownership of internal tools that solved specific business problems (e.g. automating data scraping for deal flow).
Previous experience as a forward-deployed engineer or similar embedded directly with business units.
Hands-on experience building and deploying production AI/LLM workflows that actively drive business decisions not academic experimental or personal-project-only AI work.
Background in tech-forward companies within adjacent industries such as private equity M&A or high-finance.
Highly autonomous proactive self-starter mindset.

Core stack: SQL backend services a modern frontend framework cloud fluency (AWS Azure or GCP) and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform Bicep or CDK).

Interview Process
4560 minute behavioral and technical deep dive with the Hiring Manager.
Technical work sample / take-home task followed by a collaborative review session.
Final meeting with the CEO or Executive Director.