Company Description

Otlet AI is a purpose-built platform that indexes a firm's entire project archive to answer engineering questions in plain language — citing the exact source document from the firm’s own archive with every answer. By indexing thousands of documents — structural drawings, specifications, calculations, site reports, survey records — spread across hard drives, email chains, and folders no one has opened in a decade, Otlet allows swift and easy access to information, saving engineers crucial time.

Role Description

This is a hybrid role for a Founding Team Engineer based in London, with an immediate start. The Founding Team Engineer will play a pivotal role in taking a working, technically ambitious prototype and building it into a production system that real firms can rely on. The current prototype is built on FastAPI, ChromaDB, hybrid BM25 and semantic search, a cross-encoder reranker, Claude Sonnet, and Docker. It works well at demonstrating the core concept; however, it is not yet production-ready, which is where you’ll come in.

What you will own:

— Migration from ChromaDB to Qdrant or other vector databases with per-firm data isolation

— Async ingestion pipeline via Celery and Redis for archives of at least 50,000+ documents

— JWT authentication and multi-tenant architecture

— Production cloud deployment and API hardening

— Retrieval quality: confidence scoring, conflict detection, query expansion

The above outlines some of the immediate tasks we need to complete; however, as a founding team member, your role will also include contributing to shaping the company's culture and growth. In return, you will receive equity in the company - with a standard 4-year vesting schedule and a 1-year cliff.

Qualifications

We are looking for someone who has shipped production Python backend code and understands what breaks under real load. You should be comfortable with Docker and cloud deployment, and have some exposure to search systems, vector databases, or ML pipelines — the depth matters less than the curiosity. Most importantly, you are up for the challenge of owning your own codebase from the ground up.

* Strong experience in Software Development, including programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, or similar

* Proficiency in System Architecture, Cloud Computing, and DevOps best practices

* Knowledge of Machine Learning, AI frameworks, and deployment of AI models

* Problem-solving mindset and the ability to quickly adapt to changing priorities

* Excellent communication and teamwork skills

* Entrepreneurial ambition and a proactive mindset to thrive in a startup environment

* Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field with significant ML/AI is preferred - though we care far more about what you've built than your education.