Founding Engineer
Location: Madrid (primary; also Barcelona / Bilbao / Valencia, relocate to Madrid)
Work: Onsite (no London for now)
Comp: €40k–€70k base + founding equity
Experience: Recent grad / 1–3 years (junior–mid)
Employment: Full-time (EU work authorisation)
Role summary: Owns the architecture of the whole product; works directly with the three co-founders; shapes product and writes code from week one. They want raw builder energy, not a senior hire.
Key skills — Must-have: Python, Claude Code, AI / LLM agents, shipped an end-to-end product. Strong: TypeScript, React, Node, PostgreSQL, pgvector, Redis, AWS, GCP, knowledge graphs, retrieval systems, distributed databases, unstructured data pipelines.
Scoring criteria — Critical (must clear):
- CRITICAL Based in Spain — Madrid primary (Barcelona/Bilbao/Valencia OK, relocate to Madrid); mostly in-office, no London
- CRITICAL Junior to mid — recent grad or 1–3 years (not a senior hire)
- CRITICAL Has built and shipped something serious, ideally to real users (ex-founder / early engineer ideal)
- CRITICAL AI / LLM / agents experience visible in current or recent role
Important (strong pluses):
- IMPORTANT Quantitative degree (Math, AI, CS) — hard track-record can substitute
- IMPORTANT Technical depth in at least one of: large-scale knowledge graphs, retrieval systems, LLM agent architectures, distributed databases, unstructured data pipelines
- IMPORTANT Stack exposure (Python/TS/React/Node/Postgres/Redis/pgvector/AWS/GCP)
- IMPORTANT Target universities (Spain: ICAI, ETSII-UPM, UPC, UCM, UAM; international: MIT, Stanford, CMU, ETH, EPFL, Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, TU Munich)
- IMPORTANT Target companies: BigTech (Amazon, Google, Meta, Stripe, Palantir), frontier AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Cohere, Hugging Face), top startups, and the Spanish AI/tech ecosystem
Nice-to-have:
- NICE Has started their own thing, ideally shipped to users (counts as much as BigTech)