About the role

You will build the software behind our assessments of metacognition in people, AI systems and their interaction. This means developing assessment applications, integrating AI models and building the systems that run experiments, capture data and make results useful. Your work will support the full assessment process, from a participant completing a task to a researcher analysing results or a client exploring a prototype product.

You will report to our CTO and work closely with our research engineers. Together, you will turn research methods into reliable applications, preserving the experimental requirements while making the software secure, maintainable and straightforward to use.

We are open to hiring software engineers with complementary strengths, for example in backend and platform engineering or in full-stack product development. You should bring depth in at least one of these areas and be comfortable contributing across the wider platform.

What you’ll do

Depending on your strengths and the development priorities, your work will include:

• Build clear, responsive assessment interfaces and tools for participants, researchers and clients.

• Design and implement APIs, database schemas and data pipelines that accurately capture responses, response times, confidence judgements, model outputs and experiment metadata.

• Support online studies by implementing research-defined randomisation and counterbalancing, participant session management and integrations with recruitment platforms such as Prolific.

• Build systems for scheduling and running experiments, managing background jobs and recovering from interrupted or failed runs without losing or duplicating data.

• Integrate model-provider APIs, handling concurrency, rate limits, retries, structured outputs, cost tracking and changes in model behaviour or availability, with caching that preserves the intended experimental design.

• Develop reporting and visualisation tools that help users explore prototype products, compare results and understand uncertainty.

• Work with research engineers to integrate tasks and scoring methods, preserving their intended behaviour and tracking which versions produced each result.

• Write automated tests, review code and improve deployment, logging and monitoring so that problems can be identified and resolved quickly.

• Implement appropriate authentication, access controls, audit logging and data-handling practices to protect participant and client information.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have strong programming skills in Python, TypeScript or a comparable language, and experience shipping software used by others.

• Write readable, tested code and can explain the design decisions and trade-offs behind it.

• Have practical experience in backend engineering, full-stack web development or both.

• Understand how applications, APIs and databases work together and can investigate problems across those boundaries.

• Can take an open-ended requirement through design, implementation, testing and deployment.

• Use version control, code review and automated testing, and are comfortable working in a shared codebase.

• Use AI tools fluently in your own work, with the judgement to check what they produce.

• Communicate technical ideas clearly and work well with researchers and other colleagues whose requirements may evolve as they learn.

Your background might be in computer science, software engineering or a related field. We welcome equivalent practical experience; a degree is not required.

Strong candidates may also have

We are looking for these strengths across the team, rather than expecting every candidate to have them all:

• Backend and data systems. Experience building APIs and services, designing relational databases such as PostgreSQL, and working with SQL, schema migrations, background jobs and reliable data processing.

• Full-stack development. Experience with TypeScript and frameworks such as React, building accessible interfaces, managing application state and presenting complex data clearly.

• Infrastructure and reliability. Experience deploying and operating cloud applications, using containers, automated deployment pipelines, monitoring and error tracking. Familiarity with diagnosing performance problems and recovering from failures.

• AI and research tooling. Experience integrating LLM APIs, building evaluation or experiment orchestration tools, or implementing behavioural tasks with frameworks such as jsPsych. Familiarity with versioned configurations and traceable results.

• Security and data protection. Experience implementing authentication, authorisation, secure handling of credentials and separation of data between users or organisations, and handling personal data under UK GDPR, including pseudonymisation and retention.

• Product delivery. Experience working directly with users, turning feedback into improvements and taking a feature from an early prototype into dependable use.

The opportunity

You will take ownership of substantial parts of the platform and help shape the product and engineering practices as part of our early team. Candidates with deeper experience may also mentor colleagues and lead larger technical projects.

What we offer

• A competitive salary and meaningful equity through share options.

• Hybrid working from our office in Bloomsbury, central London, with 4 days a week together in person.

• 28 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, and a workplace pension.

• A learning budget and time for conferences.

• The chance to shape a new company and develop a new approach to measuring human and AI metacognition as part of the founding team.