Founding Engineer

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

Example areas you’d be involved in

Industrial workflows

• Process 3D CAD models into efficient data structures
• Create declarative representations of complex industrial processes

Perception

• Install, calibrate, and optimize vision sensor capture and fusion pipelines
• Train and deploy computer vision models for processing 2D/3D images

Robot Control and Command

• Tune and optimize our robot motion planning and collision avoidance stack
• Build and train AI/machine learning based systems to handle real-world welding scenarios

Systems, hardware, and integration

• Design and construct sensor enclosures to protect sensors and edge devices
• Design robust network architectures with redundancy to ensure always-on and secure access to edge devices
• Engage external vendors and integrators to plan and install robotic cells

Benefits

• Private health insurance + pension contributions
• Free lunch
• Curiosity allowance (books, learning, memberships)

A note on our in-office culture: Our team works in our industrial lab near London Bridge five days a week. In our opinion, it’s a core requirement for building physical AI - and we love it. Please only apply if this excites you too.

Join us as our founding engineer and employee #4!