Founding AI Engineer
Founding AI Engineer Future Head of AI
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.
The Role
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.
Key Responsibilities
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
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
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
- 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
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
- 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.
Founding AI Engineer Future Head of AI
AI
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