About Lichen

Lichen AI gives companies the tools and experiences needed to reimagine their own business processes around the people who power them, and unlock the real value of AI.

Lichen AI is an agentic platform for AI-powered discovery. We conduct voice interviews at scale, analyse transcripts, and produce structured outputs that make AI implementation faster and more impactful. We're moving from an internal prototype to production SaaS for enterprise customers, and we need an engineer to make that happen.

The Role

We have a working prototype. Your job is to turn it into a production service that enterprise customers can rely on.

That means three things: building a robust, secure backend that handles sensitive enterprise data with confidence; creating interfaces that make complex AI-generated outputs legible and trustworthy to non-technical users; and working alongside our CTO on the agentic workflows that power the platform. This is a genuine full stack role. Frontend quality matters as much as backend rigour here. Our product lives or dies on whether our customers can quickly understand and act on what the platform surfaces.

We’re a 3-person, early stage founding team based in Cambridge UK. You'll be our first full-time engineer, working directly with the founders to build and scale the platform. This means wearing multiple hats, and you'll have real influence over what we build and how we build it.

What you'll do

• Take our working prototype to production-grade; building the foundations needed to serve enterprise customers with confidence
• Build and own the UI end to end, including interfaces that help users understand and interrogate AI-generated outputs
• Build deployment pipelines, testing frameworks, monitoring, and observability to keep the platform reliable as we onboard customers
• Design secure data pipelines that handle sensitive data with appropriate access controls and audit trails
• Ensure the platform meets enterprise security and compliance expectations (ISO 27001/ISO 42001, GDPR)
• Help shape our technical architecture and engineering practices as an early team member

What We're Looking For

We're looking for someone who can work across the stack and is excited about building AI products that genuinely serve people. 

You should have:

• Experience building production web applications, ideally for business/enterprise users
• Comfort with modern JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, we use React and FastAPI
• Comfort designing database structures and data pipelines
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
• Ability to work independently and make technical decisions with limited oversight
• Genuine interest in AI that enhances rather than replaces human work

Things that would be great but aren't required:

• Experience with LLM APIs, RAG systems, vector databases
• Background in conversational UI, voice interfaces, or NLP
• Understanding of qualitative research or data visualisation

Why Join Lichen AI?

• Shape the technical direction of a mission-driven company with the opportunity to grow into a technical leadership role as the team scales
• Work with real AI tools including conversational AI, qualitative analysis, & agentic systems
• Build technology that captures and amplifies human insight rather than replacing it

Location: UK-based (UK applications only) / Central Cambridge ideal / Remote / Hybrid;

Employment type: We're flexible. This could be full-time employment or a contract arrangement. We cannot sponsor visas.

How to Apply

Email hello@lichenai.co with:

1. Your CV or LinkedIn
2. A paragraph on why this role interests you
3. An answer to this question: Tell us about something you built where user needs prompted you to change your technical approach. What did you learn?

We'd love to hear about your experience and what draws you to this work - even if you don't meet all the criteria above. You don't need to tick every box - we know that great candidates come from diverse backgrounds and experiences.