Senior Software Engineer

London (Hybrid) | Full-time | £100-115K + early-team equity

The role

We're a well-funded startup building AI for architecture, engineering and construction: an archaic, trillion-dollar industry at a critical juncture. In the UK, the Building Safety Act is one of the most significant overhauls of how buildings are designed of this generation. Directors of AEC firms now carry personal liability for design decisions. We're building the system of record that lets them prove those decisions were sound.

You'll be one of our first engineering hires, working directly with the founders across a polyglot stack: a Node/TypeScript backend API, a React frontend, a C#/WPF Windows desktop connector and Python ML/RAG workers on Azure. You don't need experience in construction or in our exact stack. We hire for strong core engineering, and the team are polyglots who treat specific technologies as tools for tackling problems.

Why join Bite

The problem is genuinely hard. When a structural engineer changes Column C7 in their analysis model, the same column exists in drawings, schedules, specs and emails under different names, in different formats, some of which LLMs don't understand, and with no shared identifier. Resolving those references into one canonical entity, and telling the engineer exactly what just went out of date, is the core of our product.

You'll own engineering outright, not a slice of it. There's no engineering organisation to inherit and no layer of management to negotiate with. What exists today is a working platform and a small team; the standards, the architecture, the hiring bar and the shape of the function as it grows are all genuinely open, and they're your decisions to make.

Your work ships to people who pay. Our product is in production with signed customers that include some of the UK's leading structural engineering firms. Work goes from a customer conversation into the hands of working engineers within days, and you'll hear directly what landed and what didn't. If you'd rather take a call with a structural engineer at 9am and ship them a fix by 5pm than sit in a product spec review, this is that job.

What we're building

Bite is the platform that turns weeks of manual change-propagation work into seconds. Structural engineers work across a fragmented set of tools with no shared source of truth: ETABS models, SAFE analyses, Autodesk drawings, Excel specs, PDFs, emails. When a design changes, propagating that change across files is manual, slow and error-prone, and the errors are expensive.

Bite is the change management and audit trail layer for structural engineering: natural-language search across a project's entire file ecosystem, cross-file impact detection, and propagation of those changes to every affected file under the engineer's supervision, all running on a single engineering knowledge graph.

About You

• Love learning a new domain, and shipping something within weeks that actually fixes what was broken in it.

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

• Drive the architecture of the entity-resolution layer that every other part of the platform depends on.

• Design and evolve the contracts between our services, and the async queues and workers behind them.

• Improve extraction and retrieval quality in the Python ML/RAG workers, and measure whether it actually got better.

• Work with El-Amin, our CTO and a former practising structural engineer, on how engineers reason about a load path or a revision, and encode it into the data model.

• Make the pragmatic calls on tech debt with the team: what we fix now, what we log, and why.

• Bring a track record of shipping and owning production systems end to end; years matter less to us than evidence you've done it.

• Bring strong backend experience, ideally Node.js or TypeScript in a production API context, and are comfortable reading C# and Python.

• Bring experience designing and evolving APIs in production: that's what we need on day one. The specific async, event-driven tooling behind them (queues, workers, content-addressed storage) is something you'll pick up here.

• Have the instinct to keep things simple under pressure, and the judgement to know when a tactical shortcut is right and when it isn't.

• Have genuine product sense: our Head of Product shapes the roadmap, but there's no layer of product management between you and customers, and you'll exercise that judgement daily.

• Communicate clearly across deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations: clarity is what lets us move fast without losing customers' trust in what's shipped.

• Are kind, curious, optimistic and driven. We believe in being kind over being nice, and we give and receive constructive feedback constantly.

• Are comfortable in a startup where you're building the process alongside the product, with high ownership and autonomy.

What will make you standout

• LLM/RAG pipelines in production: embeddings, vector search, retrieval quality measurement.

• Graph-based data models, entity resolution, or knowledge graph tooling.

• Autodesk Platform Services or AEC data formats: IFC, Revit, ETABS, SAFE or similar.

• Windows desktop development: .NET, WPF, native integrations.

• Background in construction, structural engineering software, or document-intensive vertical SaaS.

Don’t rule yourself out over the stack. We’re looking for strong engineers with sound principles. Technologies are tools.

What you can expect from us

• £100k–£115k and early-team equity, with exact numbers on the table at the first conversation.

• Significant parts of the codebase to own outright, including the layer everything else depends on.

• Real influence over technical direction while the decisions are still open.

• Direct access to customers. You'll be on calls with structural engineers, not reading a summary of them.

• Founders who want to be argued with, and who value action over consensus.

• Hybrid working from our London office (3 days a week).

• A vertical you'll learn deeply: how structural engineering firms work, how AEC data formats behave, and how LLM/RAG systems hold up in production.

• A clear path to owning a domain and mentoring the engineers who come after you, as the team grows around you.

How we work

We believe in thorough automated testing. Not strict TDD, but every PR ships with the appropriate E2E tests, unit tests or eval harnesses. We own the entire platform including its deployment and reliability, so we control our own CI and CD. This is a hands-on, delivery-focused role, so there are times we take a short-term tactical solution to ship faster than we’d like: you’ll hold a strong line on code quality while pragmatically paying off tech debt. The team is autonomous, multi-disciplinary and empowered.

Inclusion at Bite

Bite Engineering is an Equal Employment Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other legally protected status. We want people from all walks of life to feel valued for their individuality, thrive in our business and share a sense of belonging. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, let us know.