Job Founding Engineer, London

Xylo

We're building the next era of government software.

Our vision is a world where every government service is powered by Xylo. Citizens will get decisions the same day. Backlogs will be cleared. Governments will actually work for the people they serve.

We’re starting with planning in the UK and the US. Every new housing, energy and infrastructure project starts with planning permission, yet delays continue to grow, meaning society gets less of what it desperately needs.

Planning departments are chronically understaffed, drowning in complexity, and stuck with software from the 1990s. This is a trillion-dollar global problem.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix something that affects every person on the planet. We're looking for people who lose sleep over it.

Apply now: Founding Engineer

The Role

This is for a product-minded full stack engineer who wants to move with extreme urgency and have complete autonomy. You'll help build and scale the product, working directly with the team and customers.

You’ll:

• Build new features end-to-end, from concept to deployment
• Work directly with users and see your code reduce hours of manual work the same week you ship it
• Have autonomy to take risks and make difficult decisions
• Contribute to technical decisions, architecture and product direction
• Ship extremely fast, test ideas and iterate based on real feedback

Who you are

• A full stack engineer with 3+ years of experience building and shipping products
• You're product-focused and curious about user problems
• You've worked at startups and are comfortable with ambiguity, ownership and moving fast
• You take pride in writing clean, reliable code and seeing it make a real impact
• You believe AI should make people's work better, not replace them
• You use LLMs and agents daily
• You are excited to grind with late nights and occasional weekends

Bonus if you

• Have taken an unconventional path—we actively look for people who've taken meaningful career risks (our team includes a former sculptor and a jazz pianist)
• Have built AI products deployed to production (even better if in an enterprise setting)
• Have shipped 0 to 1 before or have a founder mindset
• Care about housing, climate or public sector reform

Our stack

React, TypeScript, Supabase, AWS, Terraform, Vite, Braintrust and Inngest.

We deploy AI agents and durable workflows to do the heavy lifting of planning research. Agents autonomously gather evidence across thousands of sources, while orchestrated workflows handle validation, cross-referencing, and report generation. Each agent is scoped to a specific planning task and grounded in domain frameworks, with evals and guardrails that keep outputs accurate and auditable.

Everything is human-in-the-loop: agents recommend and surface their reasoning, officers apply the planning judgment.

The team

We’re a small team of builders who have deep expertise in regulated spaces. Habs spent 7 years as a software engineer and engineering lead at regulated tech startups, including Cytora and Marshmallow. Dermot brings his legal expertise from Hogan Lovells and Orrick to everything we do for domain and product.

Our CTO Tim is a 2x construction tech founder and led AI at a Series B climate tech. Our two founding engineers Tim and Sam have done zero to one multiple times at unicorns and exited startups.

How we work

• We’re based in the London AI Hub in Clerkenwell with fixed desks, roof gardens and dogs
• If you’re not in London, we support hybrid working with in-person team days in London every 2 weeks
• Meaningful equity - real ownership that reflects your impact
• We use AI to code faster without compromising standards - guardrails ensure we ship quality, not slop
• We have a feedback first culture and celebrate direct feedback

Interview process

1. Intro chat (30 mins) with Habs (Co-founder)
2. Technical interview (1 hour) with Tim (CTO)
3. Culture and ambition conversation with Habs and Dermot (Co-founders, in-person)
4. Offer

Apply or refer

We're still a small team building this role around the right person. If you're interested—or know someone brilliant—we'd love to hear from you.

Apply now: Founding Engineer

https://www.buildxylo.ai