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 industry at a critical juncture. The Building Safety Act now requires firms to evidence their design decisions, and directors carry personal liability.

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 Resolving those references into one canonical entity, and telling the engineer exactly what just went out of date, is the core of our product.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 the whole product, not a slice of it. There’s no ticket factory and no waiting on three other teams. You’ll take features from a conversation with a customer through design, implementation, tests and deployment, and you’ll own significant parts of the codebase outright — including the entity-resolution layer everything else depends on.

Your work ships to people who pay. The beta is in production with signed customers that include some of the UK’s leading structural engineering firms. Features go from your branch into the hands of working engineers within days, and you’ll hear directly what landed and what didn’t.

What we're building

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. The platform does three things that today take weeks of manual work: 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 three run on a single engineering knowledge graph built on content-addressed file storage, per-file structured extraction, and a canonical entity resolver that unifies concepts across file formats.

What you'll do

• 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.

What we need from you

• 8+ years of experience, including a track record of shipping and owning production systems.
• Strong backend experience, ideally Node.js or TypeScript in a production API context, and comfortable reading C# and Python.
• Experience designing and evolving APIs and the async, event-driven systems behind them: queues, workers, content-addressed storage.
• The instinct to keep things simple under pressure, and the judgement to know when a tactical shortcut is right and when it isn’t.
• Genuine product sense. We have no product managers between engineers and customers, and you’ll exercise that judgement daily.
• Clear communication. We move between deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations every day, and we value clarity above speed.
• Kindness, curiosity, optimism and drive. We believe in being kind over being nice, and we give and receive constructive feedback constantly.
• 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

• 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 nobody standing between you and shipping.
• Hybrid working from our London office.
• 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.