Founding Senior Engineer (Rust)

At Catapult, we're building AI systems that securely understand you, your work, and its full context. We call this Contextual Intelligence—the essential layer needed to build truly useful, reliable, and autonomous AI.

With this, Catapult will help you:

Find anything, from specific details to insights buried in your emails, documents, and apps
Know everything, by using AI reasoning across your data to answer complex questions
Autocomplete work, by suggesting and performing actions across your apps and device

We're solving foundational problems that Apple Intelligence, Gemini, and others haven't cracked yet. Our approach combines building cutting-edge systems for ingesting and understanding data with our powerful multi-stage reasoning models.

Our early results are promising, we're well-funded, and we're building a team of brilliant minds—sharp problem solvers, researchers, and engineers who thrive on tackling novel challenges in a dynamic, highly technical environment.

If you truly want to do the best work of your career, join us. You'll work directly with Catapult's co-founders—Rav, a 2x startup founder and former EMEA Lead at Meta, and Greg, a former Cambridge researcher who taught mathematics, statistics, theoretical CS, and AI.

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The role

The founding senior engineer is in the ultimate cross-sectional position, and will be involved in solving tough algorithmic problems, managing the entire tech stack, and building products end-to-end.

This will include building highly performant desktop applications (both the frontend and backend), as well as doing work on algorithmic development, and working closely with others on the team, especially AI engineers.

The role the founding engineer plays is limited only by their ability and ambition. The successful candidate must be an especially fast learner and problem solver with the ability to recognise and solve (or learn to solve) almost any problem that may arise.

You’ll love this role if you enjoy…

Identifying and solving very challenging technical and research-level problems
Building products end-to-end (from algorithm development, experimentation, all the way to UI/UX)
Learning and keeping abreast of current research and developments related to LLMs/NLP, vision, and more
Helping identify and tackle any technical challenge that may emerge
Pushing beyond your comfort zone and maximise your potential

Requirements and experience

5+ years of experience working on similar projects
Strong programming skills, especially in Rust and Python.
A strong track record of solving difficult problems in either an academic or industrial setting
A strong track record displaying the ability to manage engineering workflows (e.g. building robust and scalable products, working with users requests, etc.) and ideally also managing scientific processes (e.g. forming and testing hypotheses)
Experience working with NLP/LLMs or other AI/ML