We're looking for someone to help build Ember's product. You'll use AI heavily, ship software, and work across the full surface area of a fast-growing company. Your background is less important than your ability to learn, build and hold yourself to a high standard.
About Ember
We're building the future of public transport — convenient, affordable, connected and zero-emission. Our goal is to make it easier and more enjoyable to get from A to B with Ember than it is with your own car.
Ember is a tech company, not a traditional bus operator. We've built a platform that coordinates our entire operation – everything from monitoring vehicles and controlling chargers to selling tickets and calculating ETAs. This allows us to use electric buses more intensively than anyone else in the world, leading to a massive reduction in emissions. It also helps us provide a much better passenger experience, with innovative features like demand-responsive stops.
We’re still tiny, with a handful of routes and 98 buses. The challenge is to scale this 50x whilst staying lean, increasing efficiency and delivering an even better product experience. We’ve recently raised a Series A from some of Europe’s leading climate VCs and are looking for mission-driven individuals who want to get on board and help take us to the next level.
The role
This is a broad, high-impact role where you'll work directly with the CTO and co-founders. We're a team of 10 in tech. There are no product managers, no layers of process, and very few handoffs. If something needs building, we figure out what it should be, build it, ship it and make sure it works.
We're serious about AI as a product development multiplier. You'll have access to frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI and others, with generous usage limits. A typical day might involve you orchestrating several AI agents on parallel workstreams while you focus on the decisions, the design and the quality. We expect you to experiment with new tools and techniques as the landscape evolves.
Being AI-native isn't a substitute for being good. You're accountable for what ships. That means tests, observability, careful review, and the ability to debug when AI gets it wrong.
We don't need you to come from a specific background, although we expect you to be familiar with how software is built. You might be an engineer who's developed strong product instincts, a designer who's learned to code or an ex-founder looking for something new. You might come from a completely different field and have taught yourself to build software. What matters is that you're genuinely curious about all the elements that go into a great product — design, engineering, critical thinking — and willing to stretch into unfamiliar ones.
What you might work on
You’ll work on a mixture of greenfield and brownfield projects. That could include:
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Developing a self-serve checkout for coach hire bookings, letting customers design and update their own journeys and stops.
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Building a platform to manage our stationary battery storage systems, making sure we have enough power for services while bidding on energy markets and optimising when we charge up the battery.
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Creating a brand new design system and component library, and migrating our existing website to it.
Diversity and equality
At Ember, we support diversity across our team and customers. We work to ensure every employee feels respected and able to give their best, whether temporary, part-time or full-time. We’re happy to offer flexible working patterns where they make sense, are compassionate when it comes to time off and we offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave.
Read more about our approach in our Equal Opportunities Policy.
What’s on offer
You'll receive a salary of £40,000–£100,000 per annum, depending on your experience and skills, plus share options. You'll also have access to frontier AI models with generous usage limits. You'll be expected to work from our office in central Edinburgh most days — we value in-person communication — but there's flexibility around the odd day from home.
How do I apply?
Send your CV and a short note on why this interests you. Include a link to something you've built, with or without AI, that you're proud of.
Who we're looking for
You should have a desire to get involved early in Ember's growth story, with a real opportunity to make your mark. Your approach to work and thinking is more important to us than specific industry experience. The following should sound a lot like you:
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Agency. You direct your own work under ambiguity. You decide what's worth doing, figure out how to do it, and hold yourself to shipping it well.
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AI-native. You're comfortable orchestrating several agents on parallel workstreams, verifying their output and merging the results into something cohesive and ready for users.
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Experimenter. You're the kind of person who tries a new model the day it comes out. Your harness is constantly evolving. You form opinions about what works and what doesn't. You share what you learn with others. You're not precious about your current workflow - if something better comes along, you switch.
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Quality-conscious. AI makes you faster, not sloppier. You have good taste. You keep coming back to refine what you built. You think about failure modes. You have an intuition for system design. You instrument and test code. You can debug AI output when it's subtly wrong.
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Cross-disciplinary. You don't define yourself narrowly. If you’re an engineer, you want to understand design. If you’re a designer, you want to understand systems. You'll get your hands dirty with whatever is needed to build something great. You don’t delegate thinking to others.
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Direct and collaborative. You say what you think, you challenge ideas constructively and you're comfortable being challenged in return. You can work with founders who are opinionated and move fast.
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Motivated by mission. You're excited by what we're doing and the chance to shape a product that's visible in the real world. Millions of journeys are made with our buses every year and your work will directly affect each passenger’s experience.
