Founding AI Engineer

Venture-Backed FinTech Start up | Equity Opportunity | Manchester

We're partnering with an ambitious, early-stage fintech business on a mission to transform how consumers engage with and improve their financial wellbeing.

Having achieved strong early validation and entered its next phase of growth, the company is seeking a highly capable AI Engineer to become the first dedicated AI hire and ultimately build and lead the AI function.

This is a rare opportunity to join at a formative stage, influence product direction, and create AI capabilities that sit at the heart of the customer experience.

For the right individual, there is a clear pathway into a future Head of AI position, alongside meaningful equity participation.

This is not a traditional engineering role.

You'll operate as a builder, architect, and strategic partner to the founders, helping shape both the AI roadmap and the wider product vision.

The business sees AI as a core differentiator, not an add-on feature.

You will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling intelligent systems that enhance customer engagement, personalisation, automation, and decision-making.

AI Product Development

• Design and deploy AI-powered customer experiences
• Build intelligent recommendation and personalisation systems
• Create AI-driven workflows that deliver measurable user value
• Rapidly prototype, test and launch new AI capabilities

Agentic AI & Automation

• Design and implement agent-based architectures
• Build autonomous and semi-autonomous workflows
• Develop multi-agent systems where appropriate
• Leverage modern orchestration frameworks to improve customer outcomes

AI Infrastructure & Architecture

• Build scalable AI foundations and pipelines
• Develop retrieval and knowledge-management systems
• Implement evaluation, monitoring and governance frameworks
• Ensure solutions are secure, reliable and production-ready

Strategic Contribution

• Work closely with founders on AI strategy
• Help identify commercially valuable AI opportunities
• Influence product direction and roadmap decisions
• Act as the internal AI subject matter expert

Future Leadership

As the business scales, you will:

• Define the AI hiring strategy
• Recruit and mentor future AI talent
• Establish AI standards and best practices
• Build and lead the AI function

What We're Looking For

Technical Experience

• Software engineering or machine learning engineering
• Proven experience building production AI applications
• Strong Python engineering capability
• Experience deploying AI products into real-world environments

Experience with several of:

• LLM applications
• Agentic AI frameworks
• Multi-agent systems
• RAG architectures
• Vector databases
• AI orchestration platforms
• AI evaluation and observability tools
• Model optimisation and fine-tuning

Mindset

We're particularly interested in individuals who:

• Thrive in startup environments
• Enjoy building from zero to one
• Think commercially as well as technically
• Are naturally curious about emerging AI capabilities
• Move quickly and take ownership
• Want to help build a company, not just a product

Ideal Backgrounds

• Senior AI Engineer
• Lead AI Engineer
• Founding AI Engineer
• Applied AI Engineer
• AI Product Engineer
• Machine Learning Engineer (LLM Focus)
• AI Solutions Architect

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity opportunity
• Direct access to founders and strategic decision-making
• Significant autonomy and ownership
• Flexible working environment
• Clear progression pathway to Head of AI

Few opportunities offer the chance to join at such an early stage and genuinely shape the future of a business.

If you're excited by ownership, AI innovation, startup pace, and the opportunity to build a function from the ground up, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply in confidence for a confidential discussion.

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