Founding Engineer

Founding roles usually mean betting on whether the business makes it. This one's different.

I'm working with a well-established Brisbane consultancy with a serious track record in energy and infrastructure — when big projects need their costs and commercials nailed down across Australia and the region, this is who gets the call. Profitable, been at it for years, and now building their own AI platform for the exact work they already do by hand and get paid for.

So there's no chasing customers to see if the idea flies. The business already works. The commercials on the platform are sorted, there's an enterprise deal in flight with a major player, and there's real data and a real company behind it. For a founding gig, that's about as steady as it gets.

They need their first proper engineer — someone to own how the whole platform gets built, working shoulder to shoulder with the founder.

Who they're after
Not someone who'll throw an LLM at the problem and call it done. The opposite. They want the sceptic — the engineer who looks at a model and thinks "good, it can reason, but it's not owning the source of truth." If you've come up in fintech, payments, banking, defence, or any safety-critical field where a wrong answer has real consequences, you know you don't get to cut corners on how you build, test and trust your systems. That's who this role is built for.

What you'll bring

• Around 8+ years building production software at a senior or lead level
• A background where correctness matters — fintech, payments, banking, defence, safety-critical, audit or similar
• Strong backend, API design and data modelling; comfortable with state machines, versioning and controlled data changes
• Serious testing discipline — property-based, deterministic, regression
• Real production LLM and RAG experience — retrieval, eval harnesses, adversarial testing, measured accuracy (not "had a play with the API")
• You build with coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and check their work rather than trust it

What's on offer

• A true founding role with real ownership of the architecture, not a ticket queue
• The stability of an established, profitable business behind a genuinely new product
• Brisbane-based, hybrid, AEST hours
• A generous salary tailored to your seniority — we'll talk numbers early and straight, so neither of us wastes time

It's a confidential search. Full product and technical detail comes out under NDA once we're talking. If that's you or you know the exact person this is describing — hit apply or send me a message. Serious technical conversations welcome.