Lead Software Engineer

Highlights: Senior / Lead Engineer, deep involvement in product (we don't have PMs), work directly with the founders of a series A food tech company, significant stock options, build and manage a world class engineering team, full-autonomy on technical roadmap, best ideas win: no politics, just build, leverage AI across all areas of the company.

About Growth Kitchen

Eating in 2025 is like eating in 1955. We shop for ingredients, cook and waste lots of ingredients in the process. Food delivery could be 10x more convenient (press a button, get food), however, ordering is too expensive and the best restaurants are often not available where we live. Ordering is a treat - not an everyday, personalised commodity. Growth Kitchen is on a mission to change that. We want the best restaurants to be available everywhere and to become as cheap as McDonald's through scale and automation.

Our platform enables kitchen operators (e.g. Hilton Hotel) to sell well-known restaurant brands, such as The Athenian or Coqfighter from their existing kitchens. We're scaling fast (UK → international soon) and bottlenecked by automation. We have more customer demand than we can handle with our current technology.

About Engineering at Growth Kitchen

The team : Although we've raised significant investments, we're 30 people and we're a profitable business, our engineering team still young and small. You will be joining a team of three (including you). One Junior Engineer and one incredible AI / Data Science Engineer. As our first Senior / Lead Engineer, you will be an integral part of the management team, working side by side with the founders and our AI / Data Science Engineer. You will have full autonomy to build the team as you see fit, support our product roadmap and define our technical roadmap. We will allocate all the resources you need to building the team and staying at the forefront of technological innovation in the food space.

The role : You'll have the opportunity to build beyond the limitations typically found in larger firms, directly shaping our data infrastructure, analytics capabilities, and cutting-edge AI solutions from the ground up. You will take lots of real world manual workflows that we do to quality control kitchens and put them on autopilot as fast as possible, staying at the forefront of AI. This is an exceptional opportunity for learning and career growth, allowing you to develop a diverse skillset while making meaningful contributions in an environment that values innovation and fresh perspectives. You will remain hands on with code (70-80% of your time). 

We are offering significant stock options in a profitable, fast growing company.

🔧 Stack
TypeScript · Node.js · React · NestJS · Tailwind · Postgres

🧠 Projects

• Own & evolve our data ingestion engine (Deliveroo/Uber/JustEat and more)
• Build self-serve dashboards & web app for kitchens & food brands
• Get involved in greenfield projects as we drive our roadmap forward. These include, but are not limited to:
• AI food quality control (models + Mechanical Turk)
• AI & Gamified kitchen management
• Anomaly detection
• Direct to consumer sales
• Further tools / apps for quality control data collection (cameras, mystery diner, etc.)

Requirements

• Software engineer who is strong on data engineering and integrations
• Architect profile: ability to define and build stable underlying architecture that scale
• Desire to get involved with product, drive our roadmap and build, build, build
• Can leverage AI-native tools / Cursor as superpower
• Fast, curious, hands-on, enjoys hackathons and hungry to scale real-world problems
• Deep passion for fixing our food system, loves restaurants

Benefits

• An environment where you can build without blockers or politics
• Work on business critical things only
• Be part of the management team of one of the fastest growing food tech companies
• Generous salary
• Significant stock options
• Pension Scheme
• ClassPass
• 25 days of holiday + Bank Holidays