Lead Software Engineer - Rust

About Faculty

Faculty transforms organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-led AI. 

We are Europe’s leading applied AI company, and saw its potential a decade ago - long before the current hype cycle. 

We founded in 2014 with our Fellowship programme, training academics to become commercial data scientists. 

Today, we provide over 300 global customers with industry-leading software, and bespoke AI consultancy for retail, healthcare, energy, and governmental organisations, as well as our award winning Fellowship. 

Our expertise and safety credentials are such that OpenAI asked us to be their first technical partner, helping customers deploy cutting-edge generative AI safely. 

Our high-impact work has saved lives through forecasting NHS demand during covid, produced green energy by routing boats towards the wind, slashed marketing spend by predicting customer spending habits, and kept children safe online. 

AI is an epoch-defining technology. We want people to join us who can help our customers reap its enormous benefits safely.

About the Role

We're actively seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer to guide the team building the core component of our cutting-edge product, Frontier. The successful candidate will need to combine a strong technical background with a passion for teaching and knowledge sharing.

As we continue to expand our platform's reach, you'll have the unique opportunity to build a scalable AI focussed product, whilst leading the way in best technical practices. 

In this role, you'll be immersed in hands-on work, tackling complex real-world challenges using state-of-the-art technology. From optimising bed management in healthcare institutions to addressing logistics in the military and supporting sustainability goals in various industries, Frontier empowers organisations to make informed decisions through AI-driven insights.

You’ll play a key role in building the nucleus of the product - the Computational Twin Engine - as well as setting the standards for development in Rust across the broader company. Join us on this exciting journey of transforming decision-making with AI and machine learning, revolutionising how businesses thrive utilising Decision Intelligence.

What you will be doing:

At the heart of our Decision Intelligence product, Frontier, lies the Computational Twin Engine (CTE). A numerical simulation engine, the CTE is responsible for performing the complex data and CPU intensive simulation tasks upon which the rest of the product is based.

Whilst our current codebase is entirely written in Python, we’re making a big bet on Rust as the next generation language for our performance critical work, and need an engineer with deep experience in the language to bootstrap our capabilities in this area.

This is primarily a technically hands-on role, and we are looking for engineers who thrive producing high quality, high performance code. Given Rust is a new language within Faculty, we also expect the successful candidate to enjoy teaching and coaching other experienced engineers ramping up on the language.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Taking the lead as the technical expert for all things Rust.
• Developing product and performance enhancements as part of the core CTE squad.
• Setting the standards for Rust development and the entire Rust toolchain.
• Upskilling existing Faculty engineers on Rust best practices. Helping us understand what production ready Rust code looks like.
• Working closely with the Product Manager to define the roadmap for the squad.
• Evolving the core software architecture of the CTE as necessary to meet the needs of our customers
• Working closely with other engineering leaders within Frontier to define how the CTE integrates with the rest of the platform

What we are looking for:

• Extensive experience writing production ready, idiomatic Rust, ideally over many years.
• Proven experience leading teams or squads using Rust.
• Proficiency in Python and PyO3.
• Experience writing performance sensitive software.
• Experience building software for scientific or simulation use cases.   
• Experience with Entity Component Systems considered a plus

What we can offer you

The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day. This curiosity pushes us to seek truth and understanding in everything we do, to execute work in a nimble and pragmatic manner, to foster talent in one another and always to challenge assumptions.

Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to achieve our collective goals. Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet. You’ll also have the opportunity to make your mark on a high-growth start-up now poised to expand internationally.

Fostering talent is one of our core values, it’s built into our culture and what we offer. Faculty was founded by people who are passionate about continuous learning, and adding value to our people.