Founding Engineer

Location: Birmingham, UK

Salary: £70k to £90k plus equity

Working style: Hybrid, three days a week in person.

Join as our Founding Engineer and take real ownership from day one. You will set the standards for how we build, raise reliability and performance, and ship production code. You will work directly with the CTO, talk to users, and turn what you learn into product improvements that stick. If you want clear scope, pace, and the chance to shape the engineering culture, this is for you.

Build AI that gets used in real classrooms. StudyStash turns lectures into adaptive resources, formative checks, and virtual tutors that match how a course is actually taught. Universities buy it, students use it, and you get fast feedback with visible impact on learning. Lecturers stay in the loop and institutions get the insight they need to improve outcomes.

What you will do

• Ship features end-to-end across our Next.js and TypeScript stack.
• Design and implement LLM features that are safe, reliable, and useful. Think RAG, structured outputs, prompt tooling, and bias handling.
• Own performance and quality. Debug hard problems, tune Postgres, reduce latency, and raise standards.
• Automate the messy bits. Audit workflows and replace manual scripts with robust services and jobs.
• Build for compliance and accessibility. Help us keep WCAG 2.1 AA, privacy, security, and audit trails in good shape with more automation and testing.
• Talk to users. Turn lecturer and student feedback into product improvements that stick.

Your first 30 days

• Pair closely with the CTO in person, learn the codebase, and ship production code in week one.
• It is a busy season as universities onboard at semester start, so you will see the full system under real load and help us tighten processes fast.
• Identify quick wins to remove manual toil and improve reliability.

The decisions you will own

• How we build. Tools, patterns, data models, performance budgets, testing strategy.
• How we scale. Queues, jobs, observability, error budgets, release flow.
• What good looks like. You will raise the bar on code quality, DX, and incident response. The executive team sets product direction. You choose how we get there.

You will thrive here if you

• Are smart, driven, and keen to learn. You are happy to jump into new areas and contribute beyond code. We value initiative over perfect CVs
• Move fast with care. You ship, you measure, you improve
• Can give extra when the mission needs it, while keeping things healthy and sustainable

Our stack

• Next.js and TypeScript
• PostgreSQL
• Observability with Sentry
• State of the art LLMs

What we look for

Must haves

• 3 plus years shipping full-stack code with TypeScript, React, and Next.js
• Strong familiarity with LLM apps. RAG, prompting, structured outputs, bias handling
• Strong debugging and performance skills. N plus 1, memory usage, job queues

Nice to have

• Shipped a product end-to-end that scaled to lots of active users
• EdTech experience

Benefits

• Private healthcare
• Hybrid working
• Visa sponsorship available to build with us in person