Founding Engineer

We're hiring a UK-based Founding Engineer to join Pesto at an exciting early stage. Reporting to our CTO, you'll play a critical role in shaping the architecture, product, and look & feel of our AI-native platform. Expect a mix of hands-on building, strategic input, and fast-paced problem-solving. You'll help shape *what* we build next - brainstorming new ideas, stress-testing assumptions, and pushing us towards product-market fit. You'll work closely with our existing developer in India and co-founders in the UK to help build a category-defining product that supports the food and drink industry to grow sustainably. What you'll be doing - Building scalable, secure, and efficient full-stack solutions using Nodejs and React. - Designing and building AI-powered features like data parsing, anomaly detection, and conversational tools (think RAG-based chat with your sales, operations and supply chain data). - Developing ETL pipelines to process, transform, and centralise data from various sources. - Creating seamless, user-friendly interfaces that deliver powerful functionality. - Working closely with our CTO Amish to respond to new challenges and feature requests. - Collaborating with our COO Sanjay to dive into customer journeys and needs as we re-think ERP for the food system. - Explaining to our CEO Kate why the magic button she's asking for might be a lower priority than the customer feature request. Requirements* - You're a whizz with NodeJS and ReactJS. - You have design experience or you dream in systems architecture. - You thrive in ambiguity and unknowns and you're flexible and resilient. - Our values sound like the sort of place you'd love to work. - You're excited about working 3-4 days per week in our London office with us. - You already have the right to work in the UK. Nice to Haves - You've worked in or with retail or food tech software. - You've built ERPs in other verticals (or horizontally). - You've built or experimented with LLM agents, AI copilots, or autonomous workflows. - You've been a CTO or founding engineer at a start up (we're particularly interested if the business didn't take off). - You've worked in an early/pre-seed stage venture-backed business.

At Pesto, we're building the AI-native platform powering food and drink manufacturers to grow sustainably and stay resilient - because the future of food matters. Food and drink is the UK's largest manufacturing sector, yet it's been slow to digitise. With Pesto, we're changing that. We use AI and our deep experience in food tech to give companies the insights and tools they need to run more efficiently, make better decisions, and seize new opportunities. Our mission is to build the infrastructure that makes food and drink brands more resilient, sustainable and profitable. And we're on a mission to get there fast - with backing from top VCs, a world-class team, and the drive to make a tangible impact on an industry we care deeply about.