Founding Engineer
TLDR
Help build an AI-powered control layer for industrial robots, blending software, hardware, and field deployments to accelerate real-world welding solutions.
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
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Engage external vendors and integrators to plan and install robotic cells
Benefits
Private health insurance + pension contributions
Free lunch
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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!

Benefits
Free Meals & Snacks
Free lunch
Health Insurance
Private health insurance + pension contributions
Learning Budget
Curiosity allowance (books, learning, memberships)
Maihem empowers manufacturers of all sizes with intelligent robotics, making advanced automation accessible to everyone. Our tools enable these businesses to innovate and scale production like never before, breaking down barriers in manufacturing capabilities.