Founding Engineer

FirstStage is an AI recruitment platform that helps you hire top talent faster, with less hassle - and at a lower cost. We cut out the busywork, speed things up, and give candidates an experience they’ll love.

We’re already used by startups, scaleups, recruiters, consultancies, listed companies, and more. Our tech has cut screening time by 90% and candidates rate us 4.8/5. We’ve grown 400% in the last 3 months- this is your chance to join us at the ground floor!

About the role

We are hiring a Founding Engineer to rapidly iterate and build out our platform driven by customer and candidate needs.

You will:

• Build and scale core features working closely with users and the team
• Integrate LLMs across the candidate and customer experience
• Invent and ship AI-first workflows, tools, and interfaces
• Own features end-to-end - from idea to live in production
• Write, ship and validate features in the same day
• Help shape our technical direction and architecture as we scale
• Work from a London co-working space one day a week

Tech stack and approach

We use TypeScript front and back, with reliance on tests and AI-generated code. We adhere to a framework agnostic clean architecture core and lean heavily into a few select ecosystems (Next.js + Tailwind). We take an extreme view on using cheap and scalable options (e.g. Dynamo over SQL+Elastic), deferring decisions as long as possible, and minimising dependencies / surface area / threat vectors.

• Next.js
• Tailwind
• Vercel
• AWS (DynamoDB, S3, SQS/SNS)
• Stripe, Postmark and Twilio
• A mix of LLMs

About you

We're looking for software engineers with a minimum of three years experience writing software that has shipped to production. There is no maximum experience level, you just need to be a hands-on engineer willing to work across frontend, backend and AI / prompt engineering.

Required experience:

• 3+ years’ experience shipping real software to production
• Writing well-tested TypeScript across frontend and backend
• Working in startups or small, fast-moving teams
• Building AI-driven products backed by LLMs (including prompt engineering)
• Using AI tools as part of your development workflow

And you:

• Are comfortable shipping real products fast
• Enjoy learning new tech stacks and languages
• Are happy to live with tradeoffs, compromises, and tech debt
• Take ownership and solve real problems with code
• Thrive in ambiguity and early-stage momentum

Hiring process

• Apply via FirstStage (of course!)
• Quick 15-minute intro call
• In-person interview (60 mins)
• Pair programming exercise (45 mins)
• Offer

What You’ll Get

• A salary below market in exchange for meaningful early equity
• 30 days holiday (including bank holidays)
• MacBook Pro
• Flexible, hybrid working
• Training and mentorship from an experienced founder and advisors
• Rapid career progression opportunities as we grow

About FirstStage

• We’re a British, early stage, bootstapped tech start-up, achieving 400% customer growth in 2025
• We build AI and automations to cut admin out of the recruitment process and improve candidate experience
• Our main product uses AI prompting to automate the management of inbound job applications, reducing the time spent sifting and screening candidates by 90%, and consistently achieving 4.6/5 candidate satisfaction
• Founded by Luke Morton, AI advocate and tech entrepreneur. Luke personally bid over £30m in business while scaling his last tech team to 500 people, and IPO’d the business at £200m
• Luke is a big believer in growing talent having set up training academies and mentoring networks - this is your chance to join at the ground floor!

Watch a 2 minute intro to FirstStage