First engineering hire. Let engineers engineer.

The role.

You will be our founding AI engineer. AutomateX promises its clients production-grade custom AI builds, and this role exists to deliver on that promise: take the solutions the founder creates, sells and prototypes, and turn them into final, complete, launchable products. The founder is technical and stays in the build, guiding the architecture and carrying out evaluations, but the engineering is yours to own end to end.

Two tracks you would own.

• Our signature product. An AI assistant that generates rail engineering and assurance deliverables, evolving from a multi-agent document generator toward a knowledge-graph-backed platform.
• Client custom builds. Bespoke AI tools we design and deliver for rail clients. The paid, real-world work that funds and proves the company.

What you would do.

• Take prototypes to production. Architecture, build, ship, iterate.
• Own the engineering stack and the quality of what we put in front of clients.
• Sit in client conversations and lead the technical side of the discussion with the client’s counterparts.
• Learn the UK rail market deeply. The edge here is domain plus engineering, not engineering alone.
• Help decide what to build, from the friction we see in real client work.

What we look for: technical.

• A strong builder who executes, ships, then iterates. Bias to working software over perfect plans.
• Full-stack capable; comfortable owning a product from data layer to UI.
• Practical AI / LLM experience: agents, RAG, prompt orchestration. Knowledge graphs a plus.
• Can take something from a blank page to running in a client’s hands.
• Resourceful enough to unblock yourself; rigorous enough for safety-adjacent, regulated work.

What we look for: character.

This matters as much as the code.

• Patience and focus. Real progress in this sector is earned over long cycles, not sprints. The right person is energised by the slow, deliberate relationship build, not frustrated by it.
• Curious and genuinely excited by change. Happy to explore things that might not work.
• Client-confident. Comfortable in front of clients and leading a technical discussion.
• Honest. You will say when something needs to pivot. That one matters most.
• Passionate about bringing positive change to the infrastructure and construction sector, with railway at the centre.

Sector experience.

Experience in infrastructure or construction is a plus, not a requirement. What is essential is curiosity: a genuine appetite to learn the railway domain deeply.

Location and eligibility.

• This is a hybrid role. The founder is based in Guildford, Surrey, and regular in-person time is part of how we work. We are best placed to bring on someone within reach of Surrey, Oxford or London who is comfortable meeting in person from time to time.
• You will need the right to work in the UK.

The package.

• This is a founding role with genuine upside.
• Salary plus equity. The package is evaluated entirely against your capability and experience. A genuine founding stake for the right person leading the build, with a milestone-triggered cash bonus on top, tied to delivery, not to the clock.
• We are bootstrapped, not chasing VC. We scale with the contracts we win. If you want ownership, near-term revenue and independence over a hyperscale sprint, this fits.
• It often starts as a paid, milestone-funded engagement on a live client build, so we both find out if it fits before the founding-engineer package.

About the founder.

Bill Guo, FICE CEng MEng. Chartered Civil Engineer and ICE Fellow with a decade on major UK rail programmes, building AutomateX to systemise how the sector works. You would be joining someone with the domain, the relationships and a live pipeline, not a blank page.