Software Engineer (Rust)

CommonAI CIC is a non-profit membership organisation, founded on a belief in collaborative engineering for the safe and responsible development of foundational AI technologies. A place where AI startups, enterprises large and small, public sector bodies and academia can share resources and knowledge, to codevelop and grow businesses, fast.

We are led by experienced founders, investors and engineers who believe that collaborative engineering drives faster AI innovation and are backed by a mix of UK Government and private funding in order to design, build and deploy innovative AI systems.

The Opportunity

We're seeking a highly skilled Software Engineer to work on Panopticon, a new AI framework equipped with stringent control and compliance protocols. Aimed primarily at highly regulated sectors such as financial services and healthcare, Panopticon is a core component of our High Assurance programme. It is designed to enable AI systems to be used safely in high-risk environments where accuracy, explainability, and accountability are a hard requirement.

Panopticon is written in Rust, leveraging its memory safety and performance characteristics to build a robust, secure infrastructure that provides mathematical proof of correct outputs, sandboxed execution, and intelligent filtering.

As an AI-first company, we strongly believe in collaborative engineering powered by the tools we are helping to build. This role places a major emphasis on using LLMs, AI coding assistants, and autonomous agents for software development.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain core components of the Panopticon framework using idiomatic Rust.
• Develop secure execution environments, multi-model validation pipelines, and intelligent filtering systems to prevent data leakage and policy violations.
• Extensively utilise LLMs, AI agents, and advanced coding copilots to write, test, and refactor code, actively seeking ways to accelerate feature development and deployment without compromising on quality.
• Architect systems that integrate safely with foundation models and user environments, ensuring strict compliance and governance frameworks are adhered to.
• Review AI-generated code for security, performance, and correctness, establishing CI/CD pipelines optimised for AI-assisted workflows.
• Collaborate with CommonAI’s members to translate theoretical compliance protocols into production-ready software.

• Proven experience building systems in Rust and familiarity with the ecosystem’s best practices.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, systems programming, and secure coding practices.
• Direct experience and high proficiency in using LLMs and AI agents for software development (e.g., prompt engineering for code generation, experience with tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or bespoke autonomous agents for code review and iterative development).
• Familiarity with the challenges of deploying AI in enterprise environments (e.g., security vulnerabilities, regulatory risk, auditability).
• Ability to debug complex software systems and optimise for latency, safety, and scalability.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for redefining how software is written using AI.

We also value:

• Background in highly regulated industries such as financial services, banking, or healthcare.
• Familiarity with formal verification, applied cryptography, or verifiable compute.
• Experience with sandboxing technologies (e.g., WebAssembly/Wasm, lightweight VMs, containers).
• Understanding of modern AI tooling, foundation model APIs, and deployment pipelines.
• Contributions to open-source Rust projects or AI development tools (please include links to relevant projects, GitHub repositories, or technical blogs in your application).

Ideally, you will have a background in building critical infrastructure, combined with a forward-looking mindset eager to push the boundaries of AI-assisted engineering.

Benefits

• A collaborative and supportive work environment
• The opportunity to have a high impact in a growing organisation
• Competitive salary package and pension
• Professional development opportunities
• Networking opportunities with influential people from across the tech sector, financial services, and academia
• A vibrant office environment located a few minutes' walk away from Cambridge train station

CommonAI CIC is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace.