Founding Engineer

Job DescriptionArgus AI is an intelligence startup. We help governments, campaigns, institutions, and high-profile individuals understand what millions of people are thinking, feeling, and mobilising around in real time - before it shows up in polls, headlines, or unrest. Our platform combines: Large-scale social media data ingestionAdvanced sentiment and narrative analysisEarly warnings for a variety of crisis scenariosSynthetic focus groups and demographic-level insight This is not a dashboard business. We are building decision-grade intelligence for high-stakes environments. The Role: We're looking for a Founding Engineer to help build the first real version of Argus AI. You will be the first technical hire, working directly with the founder to: Build the MVP from the ground upMake key architectural decisionsShip fast, iterate faster, and get real users in the loop This is a hands-on role. You will be writing production code from week one. What You'll Be Building: Data ingestion pipelinesSocial media APIs (X/Twitter first)Scraping where APIs fall shortBackend systemsData storage, processing, and retrievalScalable services for analysis and queryingAI & analysis layerSentiment analysis beyond simple polarityNarrative clustering and topic evolutionEarly indicators of mobilisation or riskCore productInternal dashboards and client-facing outputsTools for synthetic focus groups and segmentationInfrastructureCloud deployment, monitoring, reliabilityPragmatic security decisions (this is intelligence-adjacent work), You like ownership, not ticketsYou're comfortable with ambiguity and moving targetsYou optimise for shipping, not theoretical perfectionYou enjoy working closely with a non-technical founderYou care about building something important, not just elegantYou are able and willing to work in-person, at least two or three days a week What This Is NOT: Not a CTO role (at least not yet)Not a large team with layers of managementNot a place to coast or over-abstractNot a "research-only" ML role There is a clear path to senior technical leadership as the company grows.

Strong full-stack engineering backgroundVery comfortable with PythonExperience working with:APIs (especially social platforms)Data pipelines and ETL workflowsHands-on experience with:Web scraping (e.g. BeautifulSoup, Selenium)Databases (SQL and/or NoSQL)Comfortable deploying and maintaining systems in production NICE-TO-HAVES: Experience with: NLP / sentiment analysisLLMs or ML pipelines Familiarity with: Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar)Basic data visualisation / dashboardsPrior startup or early-stage experience

£70k-£90k base salary (depending on experience)Meaningful equity with standard vesting