Founding Engineer

Who you are

• 5+ years of experience with a track record of shipping and owning production systems
• Strong backend experience, ideally Node.js/TypeScript or Python in a production context, and comfortable reading across other languages (C#, Python or TypeScript)
• Working knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals: async queues, event-driven workflows
• The instinct to keep things simple under pressure, and the judgement to know when a tactical shortcut is right and when it isn't
• Genuine product sense. You think about the user before you think about the implementation
• Clear communication. We move between deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations every day, and we value clarity above speed
• Kindness, curiosity, optimism and drive. We believe in being kind over being nice, we give and receive constructive feedback constantly, and we're building something bigger than ourselves
• LLM/RAG pipelines in production: embeddings, vector search, retrieval quality measurement
• Graph-based data models, entity resolution, or knowledge graph tooling
• Autodesk Platform Services or AEC data formats (IFC, Revit, ETABS, SAFE or similar)
• Windows desktop development (.NET / WPF / native integrations)
• Background in construction, structural engineering software, or document-intensive vertical SaaS
• Don't rule yourself out over the stack. We're looking for strong engineers with sound principles. Technologies are tools

What the job involves

• Join Bite as one of our first engineers. You'll ship across the full stack to paying customers, work directly with the founders, and own real pieces of the knowledge graph that powers everything we build
• The problem is genuinely hard. When a structural engineer changes Column C7 in their analysis model, the same column exists in drawings, schedules, specs and emails under different names, in different formats, with no shared identifier. Resolving those references into one canonical entity, and telling the engineer exactly what just went out of date, is the core of our product. You'll build on and extend that foundation
• Your work ships to people who pay. The platform is in production with signed design partners including some of the UK's leading structural engineering firms. Features go from your branch into the hands of working engineers within days, and you'll hear directly what landed and what didn't
• You'll work on the whole product, not a slice of it. We're a small team and we run one focused thing at a time. You'll take features from a conversation with a customer through design, implementation, tests and deployment. No ticket factory, no waiting on three other teams
• What a typical week looks like
• Ship a feature end to end: a Node/TypeScript API change, the React frontend that exposes it, and the tests that prove it works
• Pair with El-Amin (our CTO, a former practising structural engineer) on how engineers actually think about a column, a load path, or a revision, then encode that into the data model
• Improve extraction or retrieval quality in the Python ML/RAG workers and measure whether it actually got better
• Sit in on a design partner call and watch a structural engineer use what you built last week
• Make a pragmatic call on tech debt with the team: what we fix now, what we log, and why
• You don't need to be expert in every layer. The stack is polyglot by design (TypeScript, Python, React, C#/WPF, Azure) and we care about strong core engineering far more than specific tools
• You'll learn an entire vertical: how structural engineering firms work, how AEC data formats behave, and how to build LLM/RAG systems that hold up in production
• You'll work directly with our VP of Engineering and CTO, and as the team grows around you there's a clear path to owning a domain, leading projects, and eventually mentoring the engineers who come after you

The application process

• We respect your time and move fast. You'll hear from us quickly after every stage, and the process is as much about you assessing us as the reverse. Ask us anything
• Initial screening call (15 mins)
• Technical conversation with our VP of Engineering, walking through some of your code (30 mins)
• Pairing session with the team (1–2 hours)
• Reference checks and offer