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Founding Engineer

Job in Greater London, London, Greater London, W1B, England, UK
Listing for: Squid (YC W26)
Full Time position
Listed on 2026-02-28
Job specializations:
  • Software Development
    AI Engineer, Software Engineer
Job Description & How to Apply Below
Location: Greater London

Our vision: AI + datacenters are booming, electrification is accelerating, and trillions in generation + storage projects are queued — but the real bottleneck is the grid. Planning and operating networks is now a systems problem at national scale: complex models, messy data, strict governance, high‑stakes decisions.

The next energy unicorn is the agentic fabric layer for grids — where truth lives, change is tracked, and humans + AI agents can safely operate together. If you want a Palantir‑level challenge with real‑world impact — and to help build the unicorn of power grids —
Squid is it.

What Is Squid 🦑

Squid is building that fabric: an agentic modelling platform that sits across utility teams and tools. We unify legacy planning models and operational data into a versioned, auditable source of truth, then layer on collaboration and AI agents that help teams ask better questions, run checks, explain changes, and move faster — without losing rigor.

We’re less than 3 months old and have one of the largest grid operators globally working with Squid
.

The role

You’ll be one of the first engineers building Squid day‑to‑day —
high agency, high ownership, customer‑facing
. You’ll ship end‑to‑end (prototype → production → iterate), build core platform fundamentals, and create practical AI workflows.

We’re also AI‑native in how we build: you’ll use tools like Cursor / Claude Code heavily, run agent swarms to build/QA/deploy, and design the infrastructure that lets us ship faster with high reliability. You’ll still do real engineering (backend, cloud, data systems) — but the default is “agent‑first, human‑in‑the‑loop.”

London in‑person to start; will scale to more countries. 🦑

Requirements

We care more about taste, speed, and ownership than perfect keywords — but this is not a consumer app. You’ll probably thrive here if you:

  • Have a genuine love for energy and power grids (you want to go deep)
  • Are comfortable being customer‑facing: talking to planners/operators, turning messy workflows into product, iterating fast
  • Enjoy being full‑stack — jumping across backend + frontend and doing whatever it takes to ship
  • Like Palantir‑style problems: complex data, permissions/auditability, workflows, reliability, explainability
  • Believe AI will change serious operational software, and want to build an AI company obsessed with grids
  • Are excited to push AI tooling to it’s limits: you’ll be working and building a lot of AI infrastructure (prompts, evals, agents, harnesses, tests, tool APIs) alongside traditional code
Big Pluses (either Is Great)
  • You have strong power systems curiosity (even if you’re not a power engineer)
  • You’ve built / operated agent infrastructure (evals, tool calling, guardrails, workflows, CI integration, swarm‑style QA)

If you want to ship fast in a deep‑tech domain, build agentic infrastructure, and work directly with the people operating the grid — Squid is definitely for you. 🦑

#J-18808-Ljbffr
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