Senior AI and Software Engineer

Build the engine room of a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System (SIOS) that regulated organisations own, run offline, and can verify for years.

About Mickai:

MICKAI® is a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System (SIOS), AI that regulated organisations own and run inside their own walls, offline, on hardware they control. This is not an average pre-seed company. The product is built and live, an operational product in real use, not a slide or a prototype. It runs 50 specialised brains, 25 domain and 25 operational, under more than 60 studios that replace the enterprise cloud stack, from SAP and Oracle to Salesforce, Splunk and ServiceNow, all offline. Every consequential action is sealed into the Open Audit Record, a post-quantum signed ledger under FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65, verifiable offline for years. A self-validating harness passes over a thousand checks on the operator's own machine. Behind it sits an IP estate of 104 filed UK patent applications and 2,340 claims. Three live commercial surfaces already sit around the SIOS, with early clients lined up.

The role:

You own the parts of MICKAI that have to work when there is no internet and no second chance. The SIOS studios, the orchestration across 50 brains, and the on-device and air-gapped runtime that ships inside a customer's own walls. The code you write is the product, not a demo. Every consequential action is sealed into a signed audit ledger, and your work keeps that guarantee true.

What you will own:

• Build and scale the SIOS studios that make up the product surface
• Design the orchestration that routes work across the 50 brains
• Ship AI that runs fully offline, on-premise and on operator-owned hardware
• Write systems code in Rust and Python that holds up under real load
• Wire cryptographic signing so every consequential action lands in the audit ledger
• Package for secure enclaves, embedded targets and air-gapped deployment
• Harden the runtime for environments where you cannot phone home
• Own features end to end, from architecture through to what the customer installs

What you bring:

• Strong systems programming in Rust, Python, or both, in production
• Hands-on experience applying LLMs well beyond a notebook
• Working knowledge of cryptographic systems and how to use them correctly
• Comfort with secure enclaves, embedded AI or on-device inference
• A track record of shipping to constrained, offline or on-premise environments
• The instinct to build for verifiability and failure, not just the happy path
• Senior judgement, low ego, and the drive to own hard problems

Nice to have:

• Experience with post-quantum cryptography or signed audit trails
• Background in defence, financial services or another regulated sector
• Contributions to performance-critical open source
• Familiarity with model quantisation and running inference on modest hardware

The deal (please read):

This is a founding, part-time role. You take meaningful sweat equity now, which converts to a competitive salary once we close our seed round. It is remote only and open only to applicants based in the United Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates, for legal and compliance reasons. Some overlap with UK hours is appreciated, though not required.

Why join now:

The product is built and live. The patent estate is filed. The category is still being defined, and the engineers who join now shape how a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System gets built. This is a founding seat, not a job.

Required with your application:

Please include a link to your LinkedIn profile. Applications without a LinkedIn profile URL will not be reviewed.

How to apply:

Apply here, or email the team at hello@mickai.co.uk with a short note and anything that shows your work. Tell us what you would build in your first month. We move fast and we reply. Mickai builds its team on merit and mission, and welcomes applicants from every background.