Founding AI Engineer

At Diligent, we are on a mission to help fintechs and banks automate and enhance Anti-Financial Crime operations with AI agents. Leading banks and payment companies use us to automate risk investigations across customer onboarding and ongoing monitoring in Europe, the Middle East, the US and Asia.Our founders have built fraud and AML risk solutions protecting billions in transactions at some of Europe’s leading fintechs. We’re now using AI to rethink how financial institutions investigate customers, assess risk, and run compliance operations.

We already work with leading fintech unicorns and banks globally, are growing fast, and are looking for ambitious problem-solvers who want to help shape how AI changes financial crime operations.

THE ROLE:

You are part of the founding team. You’ll play a crucial role in shaping the future of our company - from hands-on engineering and product work, to high-level strategic decisions.

As a Founding AI Engineer you’ll work on building our core agent frameworks, innovating on how LLMs are used by enterprises in the financial services industry. You'll be testing, deploying, and scaling delightful AI experiences in addition to ensuring that our outputs are extremely high quality. This role is perfect for someone who is obsessed with language models and wants to spend their time becoming an expert in applied AI.

WHAT WE EXPECT:

Within days

• Take ownership of your first module and push improvements to production, making an immediate impact on our customers' workflows.
• Start building the product infrastructure for LLMs, giving Diligent agents the infrastructure, data sources and tools they need to automate workflows for financial compliance teams.
• Work directly with customers to solve their problems. We need someone who has high empathy and is excited by working side-by-side with risk teams to solve critical problems.

Within weeks:

• Evolve schemas and bring structure to non-deterministic outputs.
• Lead feedback calls with customers on your modules and own the end customer outcomes.
• Work directly with the CEO, CTO, and other founding members and mature our engineering practice.

Within months:

• Tackle technical and non-technical scaling problems that come with high growth.
• Hire, onboard, and nurture future teammates.
• NodeJS
• Python
• Typescript
• React

ABOUT YOU:

• Hungry and driven: Early-stage startups are intense, this is not a 9 to 5 job. You want responsibility, fast learning curves and problems where there isn’t already a playbook.
• Extremely curious: You’re not satisfied with the first explanation of a problem. You keep digging until you understand how the workflow actually works, why it breaks, and what would genuinely improve it.
• Structured problem solver: You can take an ambiguous objective, break it into hypotheses and workstreams, identify the highest-leverage issues and drive toward a measurable result.
• A true owner: If something is stopping a deal or deployment from succeeding, you feel responsible for figuring out why and getting it solved.

We are seeking to make our interview as experiential as possible in order for both sides to get the most signal on what it would be like to work together.

• CTO meet-and-greet (30 mins): Introductory call with CTO - get to know each other a little
• Technical interview (60 mins): Deepdive interview with CTO focusing on problem solving, coding proficiency, systems design and architecture.
• Workday in office + Team meet-and-greet (0.5/1 day): Come work with us for a day or half a day in our office on a small project.And meet the whole team!
• References and offer: Ideally over dinner!