Founding Engineer / Technical Lead

Role: Founding Engineer / Technical Lead
Location: Central London - Site Based
Salary: £120,000 plus Bonus

An early-stage venture is building the payments layer for connected vehicles - enabling cars to automatically detect, process, and settle real-world road charges without driver intervention.

Parking. Tolls. Congestion charging. Airport drop-offs. Today these systems are fragmented, manual, and operationally painful. The mission: make vehicle payments invisible.

The business is launching where the pain is greatest - rental and fleet operations - helping eliminate unpaid charges, reduce admin overhead, and improve customer experience through intelligent automation.

The role will commence in July, so you will need to be available to start quickly.

The Opportunity

This is a rare chance to join at day one and shape both the product and engineering function from the ground up.

Working directly with an experienced founder, you will architect and build the platform, make foundational technical decisions, and play a key role in defining the future team and culture.

This is a hands-on builder role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves quickly, and enjoys creating systems from first principles.

What you will own

• Designing and building the core platform and architecture -you decide the technology stack.
• Integrating with telematics platforms, connected vehicle APIs, and payment infrastructure
• Creating geospatial decision engines to detect vehicle movement and charge events.
• Building billing, orchestration, and operational tooling
• Developing scalable backend services and APIs
• Working closely with mobility ecosystem partners
• Establishing engineering standards and helping scale the team over time

Ideal Background

We are looking for exceptional builders with start-up experience.

What are we looking for?

• Taking products and teams from 0 to 1
• Building backend platforms and distributed systems
• Cloud-native platforms and high-scale APIs

And one or more of the below:

• Fintech or payments infrastructure
• Mobility, telematics, automotive, fleet, or transport technology
• Geospatial systems and location intelligence

Technical Environment

Experience across several of the following is valuable:

• Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, or similar
• REST APIs and distributed architectures
• AWS and cloud infrastructure
• PostgreSQL and data-intensive systems
• Docker, CI/CD, observability, and reliability engineering
• Third-party integrations and secure production systems

The Person

• Strong product instincts
• High ownership mentality
• Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
• Excellent communicator
• Energised by startup pace and autonomy
• Interested in growing into an engineering leadership role

Why This Role

• Founding-level impact
• Significant influence across product and technology
• Direct customer and partner exposure
• Build in a category with enormous potential at the intersection of mobility, payments, and software infrastructure
• Partner with a founder who has previously built and exited a business in the space