Staff Solutions Engineer

About Always Further

AI agents are becoming autonomous — they execute code, call APIs, and make decisions without human oversight. An adequate security approach to govern them doesn't exist yet. We're building it.

Our founding team created Sigstore, the open-source signing standard now used by npm, PyPI, Kubernetes, and other critical infrastructure. We're applying that same thinking to agentic security: execution boundaries, immutable attestation, and dynamic capability management for AI agents.

About the Role

We're looking for a Solutions Engineer join as a founding engineer and to sit at the intersection of our open source community and our growing base of enterprise design partners. You'll spend your time contributing to Nono, helping shape its architecture, and working directly with customers who are integrating it into proof-of-concept and pilot programmes. This is a hands-on role - early on you'll be deep in the code, reviewing pull requests, triaging issues, and experimenting with deployment architectures, all while being a trusted technical voice for both community members and enterprise stakeholders. Over time, the role will evolve toward solutions architecture and customer-facing engagement, as you build the domain expertise and relationships that make you the go-to person for designing how Nono fits into complex enterprise environments.

What You'll Do

• Contribute directly to the Nono open source project - code, documentation, and architectural proposals.
• Experiment with different deployment architectures for Nono across cloud environments, on-premise infrastructure, and hybrid setups and share your findings with others at Always Further, and often with the community, via our blogging platforms or YouTube channel.
• Work closely with early design partners to integrate Nono into proof-of-concept and pilot programmes, gathering feedback and translating it into engineering priorities.
• Support pre-sales and post-sales engineering conversations with tier-1 enterprise organisations.
• Produce technical content - blog posts, architecture guides, demos - that helps users and customers get the most out of Nono.

What We're Looking For

• AI engineering experience. You understand how modern AI/ML workloads are built, deployed, and orchestrated. Familiarity with agent frameworks and LLM-based systems is a strong plus.
• Rust and Python proficiency. You don't need to be a language lawyer in either, but you should be comfortable reading, writing, and reviewing code in both. Rust experience is especially important for contributing to Nono's core, while Python is often used for tooling, research integration, and customer-facing scripts.
• DevOps and cloud fluency. You've worked with container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and some familiar with others.. Infrastructure-as-code is a strong point.
• Security background. Understanding of host isolation, sandboxing, and supply chain security is highly valued. If you've worked on container security, VM isolation, or trusted execution environments, even better.
• Open source experience. You've contributed to or maintained popular open source projects and understand how healthy communities operate - governance, code review culture, release processes, and community engagement.
• Strong communication skills. You're equally comfortable in a GitHub issue thread with community contributors and in a room (or on a call) with enterprise architects and CISOs.

Nice to Have

• Background in systems programming, low-level Linux, or virtualisation technologies.
• Strong hands on architectural knowdledge of how to deploy and operate complex distributed systems in production.
• Familiarity with AI agent security challenges - prompt injection, tool misuse, data exfiltration, lateral movement.
• Previous experience in a solutions engineering, or field engineering role at a startup or open source company.

Why Join

• Foundational impact. You're not joining a team — you're building one. Your architectural decisions become the product.
• Foundational Stake & Compensation. As an early foundational hire at a pre-seed company, you will receive a highly competitive equity stake designed to reward early risk-taking and outsized impact, paired with a pre-seed base salary.
• Remote, UK preferred. We're UK-based but open to exceptional candidates wherever they are. We provide flexible working built on trust and ownership.

Interested? Send us your CV along with your GitHub profile that links to any relevant open source contributions, blog posts, or projects. A short note on why this role interests you goes a long way.