Title: Founding Staff Engineer (Agentic Systems & AI Infrastructure) at Melow

Location: Remote Europe (London preferably) | Full-Time | Founding Team

Salary: up to $130k base + 1% equity 

Build the Future of AI Infrastructure

Key Skills

• Python
• AI concepts
• Data Strategy
• Building scalable systems
• Cloud Security
• Data Science
• Working with large quantities of complex data
• Backend programming
• Systems Design
• Multiple programming languages

Important Note: We work directly with the internal team, so please do NOT try to apply directly, as this may slow down your application

Melow is building the AI Operating System for data. A dynamic ontology engine making sense across all forms of structured and unstructured data - and a new form of AI worker that executes autonomous workflows with transparent human reasoning across real tools.

We’re building the AI middleware for the world that lets AI understand data the way only data teams do to reason, plan, and act inside real systems. We’re still in stealth, but already working with some of the most recognized companies in the world across fintech, travel, insurance, gaming, and logistics.

We’re builders, solving real and messy problems. Our goal is to define a new software category - and we’re just getting started. We have clients, have raised money, and now want to release what we have built to the world.

The Role: Founding Staff Engineer

Join a high-caliber founding team and take ownership of core AI infrastructure and software engineering - creating automated semantic layers, complex agentic infrastructure, transparent reasoning engines, and orchestration logic.

You’ll work directly with the CEO’s, CTO and development team, helping shape our architecture from first principles and build the foundation for intelligent autonomous systems. This is a hands-on role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves fast, and wants to leave a legacy in AI infrastructure.

What You’ll Own

• Build our core agent infrastructure: Scalable agent orchestration, task planning, memory, and execution logic using Python and open-source LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc).
• Engineer automated ontology systems: Design the semantic layer that connects every source - structured and unstructured - into a shared data brain.
• Own the agent runtime: Robust planning, tool execution, and observability for distributed, autonomous systems.
• Scale our data infrastructure: Build and maintain metadata stores, data connectors, ETL, and vectorized storage (Chroma, Pinecone, Weaviate).
• Advance our reasoning engines: Build hybrid LLM + symbolic reasoning pipelines, task decomposition frameworks, and long-term agent memory systems.
• Define our engineering culture: Set the bar for system design, quality, and speed. Mentor others, help us hire exceptional talent, and drive long-term architecture.
• Go full-stack if needed: We move fast - sometimes you’ll ship backend APIs, other times hack together a frontend to get feedback.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in backend, infra, or AI systems roles.
• Deep Python expertise. You’ve shipped production systems using LLM’s, LangChain, vector DBs, or custom LLM tooling.
• Real-world experience building agentic systems: reasoning, short and long term memory, tool use, semantic data layers.
• Expertise in ontology development, schema reconciliation, and knowledge graphs.
• Strong foundations in modern data infra (e.g., dbt, BigQuery, Airflow) and cloud (GCP or AWS).
• Background in symbolic AI, reasoning systems, or semantic data modeling is a huge plus.
• Experience at an early stage startup is a must.
• Experience at data native companies like Palantir, DeepMind, Databricks, Snowflake, or early-stage AI infra startups is highly valued.
• Extremely motivated. You’ve shipped side projects, competed in coding competitions, built tools for fun. You think in systems and want to build something that endures.
• You 10x with AI tools - Cursor, Windsurf, Cody, etc are part of your daily workflow.
• Grit - we are a startup that values execution, speed and autonomy. Willingness to take the jump, set and meet deadlines by any means
• Hands on builders - prioritize getting hands into code, and shipping fast focused on customer value, over management of people.
• Value driven builder - will obsess over customers to get to the best version of what we release

Why Join Melow?

• Frontier tech: You’ll help define the foundations of a new category in AI infrastructure.
• Founding ownership: Equity, decision-making power, and deep technical responsibility from day one.
• Enterprise traction: Already working with global leaders in critical industries.
• Velocity & autonomy: Small team. Big problems. No bureaucracy.

Backed by conviction: $3.1M seed round from top European and US funds.