Senior Software Engineer

About the role

THE ROLE

We're a well-funded startup using AI to decrease risk and grow margin in the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Our current focus is general contractors. When they bid to build a major project, such as a skyscraper or an airport, they price millions of pounds' worth of project risks, and treatments for them, by hand, and often inaccurately. During delivery, risk treatments that were suboptimal or never applied erode the margin. Despite billions in annual revenue, contractors only keep ~2%. Bite puts contractors' data to work at tender and through delivery, so the bid price rests on evidence and the margin predicted at tender is the margin realised.

You'll be one of our first engineering hires, working directly with the founders and with Phil Cowans, our fractional CTO, who co-founded Songkick and Nested as CTO and studied Bayesian machine learning at Cambridge (the maths behind probabilistic risk pricing). The platform is in production on a Python backend and a React/TypeScript frontend on Azure. You don't need experience in construction or in our stack. We hire for strong core engineering, and the team treat specific technologies as tools for tackling problems.

WHY JOIN BITE

The problem is genuinely hard. A tender pack is thousands of pages of drawings, specifications, contracts and bills of quantities, with a tight deadline for bids. Turning it into a structured risk register, then into a defensible bid price checked against similar completed internal and external projects, is the core of our product. Every number has to show its working, because contractors won't trust things they can't interrogate and deeply understand.

You'll own whole parts of the product, not a slice of them. There's no ticket factory and no waiting on three other teams. You'll take features from a conversation with a customer through implementation, tests and deployment, and own significant parts of the codebase outright, including the extraction pipeline the risk model depends on.

You'll build it in the room with the customer. We're co-developing the product on real data with some of the world's largest general contractors. You'll hear what works and what doesn't directly from bid and risk teams.

WHAT WE'RE BUILDING

Today, contractors set the risk premium on instinct: a top-50 risk register in Excel, scored by hand, with treatments that are often suboptimal and rarely followed through. Decades of completed-project data sit in archives that are never really used, and nine in ten construction projects still run over budget or schedule.

Bite ingests the whole tender pack, auto-builds the risk register for the team to review, and prices it with Monte Carlo simulation reconciled against a reference class of similar completed projects. Through delivery, an AI auditor tracks risks and treatments, and every completed project improves the next tender.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Ship features end to end across the Python backend, the React frontend, and the tests that prove they work.