Founding Engineer - Platform & Payment Rail

Founding Engineer, Platform and Payment Rail

Shipio

Location: London or UK remote, with regular days together in London

Package: Competitive salary plus meaningful share options from day one

Why Shipio

How do you price moving a hospital's MRI scanner, a wind farm's gearbox, a lab full of delicate instruments or a high-value sculpture? Twenty-five years ago, getting an instant price for a parcel was hard. Now it barely registers at checkout. Shipio is building the infrastructure that does the same for complex goods, so including the logistics price in the sale of a turbine blade becomes as simple as adding postage to a T-shirt.

Today every one of those prices rests on dozens of judgement calls about handling, equipment, packing, routing, customs and timing. A specialist operator with years of experience pieces each quote together in spreadsheets and email, and a complex quote can take days. Shipio handles all of that variety inside one system: a vertical AI that reasons through each job, a deterministic pricing engine that produces the price, and a payments rail that settles the transaction. Pricing appears wherever customers want to buy, and for logistics companies quoting stops being the bottleneck and starts driving growth.

It's already in customers' hands. Design partners have been using the product for around six months, and we're backed by Fuel Ventures. Our customers are specialist logistics companies, usually between 20 and 200 people, in a market worth around £1.2 trillion that still runs largely on email and spreadsheets. Shipio earns a fee on the transactions that run through it, so the payment rail sits at the centre of how the business makes money.

Our founder, Hugo, is an engineer by background and designed both the pricing algorithm and the vertical AI. Before Shipio he founded a tech-enabled specialist freight forwarder in fine art, which is where he saw the problem first-hand. You'd be one of the first two engineers, building the core team alongside him, with real ownership from your first week, share options in what you build, and work that goes straight into live transactions for customers.

The role

You own how Shipio scales and how it makes money. That covers distributing the pricing engine and payments infrastructure, the automated self-serve onboarding that lets a new supplier sign up and start on their own, and the rail that moves the money. You take the platform from a handful of suppliers to thousands, keep every customer's data apart, and make sure every transaction settles reliably and cheaply. You take features from idea to release yourself, generating the idea, planning the product, designing it, building it and shipping it, and you're accountable for the value it creates for customers. It's a role for an engineer who has built systems that move money, wants full ownership of complex delivery and wants to push an agentic way of building further.

What you'll do

• Work with the Founder to turn the product strategy into a roadmap for the platform and payments, and define how each part should behave.
• Build self-serve onboarding so any new supplier can sign up to Shipio and start using it on their own.
• Scale the platform from a handful of suppliers to thousands, with every customer's data kept apart.
• Build low-friction, reliable payment and settlement flows, optimised for payment and FX fees.
• Own reconciliation and the controls that prove nothing leaks, and maintain the tests that keep pricing and payments precise.
• Shape the agentic pipeline the whole team builds with: new agents, sharper checks and faster loops.

What you'll bring

• Multi-tenant cloud products you have designed and run.
• Systems you have built that move money: settlement, reconciliation and the controls around them.
• An engineering practice built around AI agents that you already run and can show us.
• An agentic way of building. You read code closely and understand architecture properly, while much of the day-to-day build runs through AI agents.
• Product sense: you generate the ideas and plan the product as well as build it.
• Based in the UK and able to spend regular days in London.

Nice to have

Cross-border payments and FX; payments platforms or marketplaces that take a fee on transactions; self-serve onboarding for business customers; logistics or supply chain software; early-stage start-up experience.

What we offer

• Share options: Meaningful share options from day one
• Working pattern: London office or UK remote, with regular days together in London
• Influence: A seat at the table, shaping the product, the architecture and how the next engineers are hired
• Start date: We're happy to work around notice periods for the right person

How we hire

We keep it short, every step shows you how we work, and we'll tell you where you stand at each one.

1. A 30-minute conversation with our talent partner. It's recorded, so you only tell your story once.
2. A conversation with Hugo, our founder: hear where Shipio is going and pressure-test it.
3. A paid live build using your own AI tools on a real slice of the problem, then a review together. You'll see how we work, and we'll see how you think.
4. References, then an offer.