Principal Engineer

Unlikely AI is a contrarian Artificial Intelligence start-up founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe.

William is best known for his key role in the creation of Alexa following the acquisition by Amazon of his first start-up, the voice assistant company Evi. Unlikely AI is his next start-up with ambitions to exceed that earlier success.

This is a key opportunity to join us as an early employee, to make a significant impact on the fortunes of the business and help define the company, culture, product and software engineering practices. Please see our Company Principles to understand the core things we value – in particular we are looking for exceptional people who are willing to tackle some of the most difficult technical problems there are, in order to create something extraordinary with huge impact.

We are building an extremely exciting AI platform and associated applications using novel and potentially revolutionary techniques.

We are looking for an extremely smart and dedicated Principal Engineer to drive technical expertise, engineering best practices and solve significantly complex technical problems. You will be responsible for driving clarity, technical innovation and effectively influencing technology direction and decisions. This is an excellent opportunity to have a huge impact on shaping best in class engineering across the company.

Compensation will be through salary and generous share options. The company has a tax-efficient EMI share option scheme set up (not available to larger companies) which allows us to provide real exposure to the success of the company without taxes being due when they are paid.

We are based in London. After two years of operating completely remotely during COVID we are now operating a hybrid regime where we have a small office near Holborn tube station which is available to anyone who wants to work there. We also have occasional team days where everyone meets face to face and days where people work heads down from home, communicating with colleagues using slack and zoom.

10+ years of software engineering experience, with exceptional coding ability ideally including experience in high-growth start-ups.

5+ years of experience leading technical projects as an individual contributor, projects with mission critical impact, working cross-team and cross-organisation where required and executing on delivery.

Demonstrable success in solving complex technical problems.

Exceptional at providing feedback, and a strong mentor to others, able to educate on expertise.

Demonstrable success in ensuring the highest quality of architecture and design of systems.

Expert knowledge and experience of using architectural techniques to build massively-scalable systems - or systems which can become massively scalable.

Expertise in best practices for agile software development.

Ability and desire to learn new technologies quickly and work in a fast paced start-up environment.

Exceptional verbal and written communication skills.