Senior Product Engineer / Tech Lead

The way companies innovate is broken. The systems built to create and protect ideas can’t keep up with the pace of change. Today, 90% of S&P 500 company value is intangible (e.g., in intellectual property) - yet R&D and IP teams spend half their time buried in manual work, sifting through patents and paperwork instead of pushing the frontier forward. The tools of creating and protecting are stuck in the past. We’re here to fix that.

Ankar is building the R&D tools for the AI era and defining what applied research will look like in the next 20 years. We’re building infrastructure and product experiences our customers rely on every day. You’ll translate messy, ambiguous problems into clean, dependable software—and you’ll do it at the cutting-edge of AI.

We’re at an inflection point:

• We’ve raised >$24M to date from Tier-1 VCs like Atomico, Index Ventures, Norrsken, Daphni, and angels like the Founder of Hugging Face, CEO from Datadog, and Leaders from DeepMind and OpenAI.

• We’re already working with the world’s most innovative companies including Fortune 500 company L’Oréal and global law firm Vorys

• Expanding our world-class team with alumni from Palantir, Amazon, and BCG to tackle the $1T+ innovation market. We’re just getting started.

We are growing our team and looking for people who take ownership of ambitious projects, solve complex & high-impact problems, and do the best work of their career. This role is for a Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead who thrives on ownership, speed, and impact, and who wants to build products directly alongside users.

• Build world-class product. Design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable systems and user-facing product experiences that customers depend on.

• Translate messy problems into dependable software. Work from first principles to turn ambiguous requirements into clear, maintainable, production-ready solutions.

• Ship fast and iterate constantly. Deliver quickly, learn from real feedback, and refine the product week by week with direct access to customers.

• Own end-to-end execution. Take full ownership of projects across frontend, backend, and deployment—from design to implementation to monitoring and maintenance.

• Drive clarity, velocity, and long-term quality. Establish patterns, improve engineering practices, and help shape technical direction as Ankar’s mission evolves.

• Partner deeply with product and customers. Collaborate closely with product, design, and customer-facing teams to ensure what we build is useful, usable, and impactful.

You’re a product-minded, critical builder. You care deeply about what you build, and you have a track record of turning ideas into software that real users love.

• You’re high agency. You take initiative, own outcomes end-to-end, and don’t wait for perfect direction to move forward.

• You thrive in fast-paced environments. You’re energized by rapid iteration, tight feedback loops, and the reality that “done” is always evolving.

• You’re grounded and thoughtful. You balance speed with quality and design systems that stay maintainable under real-world constraints.

• You’re excited about AI and its impact. You have demonstrated interest in AI through work experience, projects, or open-source contributions—and you’re motivated to build at the frontier.

• You ship meaningful product improvements weekly and build trust through consistent execution.

• You proactively identify what the product needs next, not just what’s assigned.

• You raise the bar for quality and velocity through strong engineering judgment.

• You design systems that scale with users and maintainability over time.

To ensure this is aligned with a senior engineer bar, here are clear minimum requirements:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including building and shipping production systems end-to-end.

• Experience owning projects independently, including scoping, execution, rollout, and iteration based on feedback.

• Strong systems thinking: ability to design reliable, maintainable software and debug complex issues across the stack.

• Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and to work directly with customers when needed.

• Strong product intuition and experience partnering with design/product on user workflows.

• Experience in fast-moving startups or high-ownership environments.

• Our stack: Java, Python, Elastic, Postgres, React, TypeScript

• Location: Shoreditch, London (we operate an office first policy with flexibility)

• Contract: Full-time

• Compensation: We pay competitive salaries and will reward you with a substantial equity package under the tax-efficient EMI scheme.

• Visa sponsorship: Yes