Founding Engineer

About the role

Location: Our industrial lab near London Bridge, in person 5 days/week, occasional travel to industry partners across the UK, Europe, and the US.

Competitive salary: GBP 100-150K + bonus + meaningful equity.

About Tekton Dynamics

At Tekton Dynamics, we are on a mission to empower every manufacturer, no matter their scale, to invent and build anything using intelligent robots.

We are building the AI-powered control layer for industrial robots — starting with welding.

Take a look at what we’re building and how we operate.

We are:

- Backed by Y Combinator and founders of PayPal, Affirm, Slack – with a $6M seed round. Scout investments by Sequoia, a16z, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins.

- Founding team of AI PhDs and previous startup CTOs – everyone has a founder/CTO background.

- Building with real industry partners from the start – focused on shipping robotic solutions for real-world deployment in record time.

Your Role

As Tekton Dynamic’s Founding Engineer , you’ll operate as a core member of our multi-disciplinary product engineering team. You'll be researching, planning, and developing systems and software across our entire engineering stack.

This is not a typical “Software Engineer” role. You’ll design, build, and maintain core systems that fuse software, hardware and networks. You’ll be both in the weeds with deeply technical subject matter across software, robotics, and AI — and hands-on installing vision sensors, industrial robots, and welding equipment in our R&D lab and our customers’ production facilities.

We value “T-shaped” engineers who:

- Dive into subject matter they are unfamiliar with

- Apply first principles to solve technical problems

- Index on solving the right problems over finding the perfect solution

- Debate with data and logic, and then commit fully to executing team decisions

- Appreciate that delivering customer value requires communicating and building trust with our customers

Must-haves:

- 3+ years shipping software in highly technical startup environments

- “T-shaped” systems and software generalist

- Designed, built and deployed software as part of an engineering team

- Comfortable and confident in debugging messy reality: edge networks, hardware calibration, sim-to-real gap

- Proven team player, clear communicator; you think from first principles, you identify assumptions and test them methodically, you question the ‘why’ behind every decision

Nice-to-haves:

- Familiarity with training and evaluating machine learning pipelines

- Experience in harsh industrial settings (welding/fabrication/heavy industry)

- Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

- Robotics and/or computer vision experience

- Edge compute deployments, latency optimization and reliability monitoring