Unknown - Lead Software Engineer

• Own the technical direction of the platform, from tender-pack ingestion to the risk engine, and write and review code on the critical path yourself. • Turn messy tender packs and contractors' project archives into structured, citable data the risk model can trust. • Take the risk model from research to production with Phil: reference class forecasting, Monte Carlo pricing, and the evals proving accuracy. • Hire and grow the engineering team, and set the bar every subsequent hire is measured against. • Establish how engineering operates as it scales: standards, code review, release, on-call, and how work gets prioritised. • What we need from you • A love of learning a new domain, and shipping something quickly that actually fixes what was broken. • A track record of shipping and owning production systems end to end. Years matter less to us than evidence you've done it. • Experience hiring, growing and leading a small engineering team. • Strong backend depth, ideally Python in production, and comfortable working across a React/TypeScript frontend. • Experience owning architecture for data-heavy systems: ingestion pipelines, queues, workers and storage. • Experience putting LLM or ML features into production, and measuring whether they're actually right. • Genuine product sense so you can independently weigh technical trade-offs against customer value. • The instinct to keep things simple under pressure, and the judgement to know when a tactical shortcut is right and when it isn't. • Clear communication across deeply technical, semi-technical and plain-language conversations. Contractors buy outputs they can audit, so explaining the working matters. • What will make you stand out • Probabilistic modelling or forecasting in production: Monte Carlo simulation, reference class forecasting, regression on messy real-world data. • Structured extraction from long, document-heavy inputs such as contracts, specifications and drawings. • Per-client or on-premise deployment for enterprise customers with sensitive data. • Background in construction, tendering, estimating, cost or risk management, or document-intensive vertical SaaS. • Don't rule yourself out over the stack. We're looking for a strong engineer with sound principles. Technologies are tools. • What you can expect from us • Early-team equity: the numbers on the table at the first conversation. • A seat at the table on product direction: how the risk model works, and what we build next, are still being decided. • A supportive team: founders who want to be argued with and nobody between you and shipping. • A domain you'll learn deeply: how contractors price and manage risk, and how AI and statistical models hold up against real project outcomes. • Direct access to customers: you'll be invited to all product discovery calls. • Tight feedback loops: you'll see how a change performs on real customer data within days. • A clear path to CTO: we'll agree up front what it takes to own the whole domain. • We believe in thorough automated testing. Not strict TDD, but every PR ships with the appropriate E2E tests, unit tests or eval harnesses, and for the risk model, backtests against completed projects are how we know a change made it better. We own the entire platform including its deployment and reliability, so we control our own CI and CD. We work discovery first, prototype second, on real customer data within days. The team is autonomous, multi-disciplinary and empowered, and works on one focused thing at a time. It's your call if you'd like to change any of this. • Inclusion at Bite • Bite Engineering is an Equal Employment Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other legally protected status. We want people from all walks of life to feel valued for their individuality, thrive in our business and share a sense of belonging. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, let us know.