Founding Engineer

We're really excited to kick start an exclusive search for a couple of Founding Engineers for a brilliant start-up client (and friends) of ours in the South West! They're rewriting how businesses fund environmental restoration, building the plumbing that turns a slice of ordinary commercial activity into traceable, verified funding for nature, automatically, at scale.

Think of it as a new financial layer sitting quietly underneath everyday business payments - one that diverts a portion of value toward verified environmental restoration, with proof of impact built in rather than bolted on afterwards.

They are already live in UK retail, working with major partners, and backed by leading voices in nature finance. They're small, ambitious, and solving a genuinely hard problem: how do you move real capital into real ecosystems, transaction by transaction, and prove every penny landed where it was meant to.

We're looking for a mid-level Founding Engineer to join a small founding team, working directly with the Co-founder/CTO and Head of Engineering. This is a product-facing role, not an infrastructure or backend one - they already have those areas covered. What they need is someone who genuinely cares about delivering products for people: how something looks, how it feels, and whether it actually solves the problem it was built for.

You could come from any of these backgrounds — they care far more about the underlying skill than the job title on your last CV:

• Front end / full stack
• UI/UX
• Data
• Design
• Product
• Apps

• Application layer: three  headful  Ruby on Rails applications, actively being migrated to headless React/Type Script frontends
• API: Ruby - staying Ruby, as the backbone the new frontends talk to
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
• CI/CD: Git Hub Actions

you'll have real freedom to shape frontend technology choices, not just implementation. If key architectural decisions haven't been finalised by the time you join, you'll have a genuine say in them - and even where they have, you're free to challenge, evolve, or rebuild on what's there if there's a better way

• Take features and products from concept through to delivery, with real ownership of the outcome
• Work directly with real-world user feedback - collecting it, interpreting it, and acting on it
• Contribute to architecture and design decisions as we build out the product
• Spot areas ripe for efficiency or automation, and go and fix them without waiting to be asked
• Get stuck into whatever the business needs that week - that's what founding engineer means there

• 3+ years' experience, with some exposure to architecture and design (nice to have, not essential)
• Examples of taking a feature or product from concept through to delivery
• A genuine team player who takes ownership and accountability for their own work
• Strong problem-solving skills
• A real passion for, and demonstrable experience with, AI tooling - you see AI as an opportunity, not a threat, and actively look for where it can add value
• Genuine curiosity about the latest tech trends and what's new
• Happy to chip in and pick up the slack - you find variation exciting, and no two days look the same
• Genuinely bought into what they're doing in nature - this has to matter to you, not just be a nice-to-have
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, changing environment
• Familiarity with Agile ways of working and tools
• A self-starter who looks for ways to improve how things get done

• Genuine founding-team equity and real influence over the product and how it's built
• A seat close to the company's next chapter - more on that at interview
• The chance to build something that routes real money into real nature restoration, with the proof to back it up
• A small, sharp, mission-driven team who'll push you to do the best work of your career