Head of Applied AI (Fintech)

TL;DR

Head of Applied AI (Fintech): Building and scaling an AI-native platform for global payroll, compliance, and HR operations with an accent on high-accuracy data extraction and autonomous agentic workflows. Focus on designing production-ready LLM systems, implementing rigorous evaluation frameworks, and creating a scalable AI infrastructure for multi-jurisdictional regulatory environments.

Location: Onsite in New York City

Company

AI-native platform unifying payroll, compliance, HR, and financial operations across 150+ countries.

What you will do

• Design, build, and ship end-to-end LLM-powered features, including document understanding and structured data extraction from payroll inputs.
• Construct rigorous evaluation frameworks with ground-truth datasets and regression tracking to ensure regulatory accuracy.
• Own the AI infrastructure stack, including RAG pipelines, vector stores, embedding systems, and model serving.
• Implement hallucination controls, confidence scoring, and audit trails for model-driven financial decisions.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate business needs into technical model specifications.
• Establish engineering standards, code review processes, and documentation to support a growing AI team.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience in ML or AI engineering.
• 2+ years of experience building and shipping production LLM systems (not prototypes).
• Strong Python engineering skills for writing production-quality, testable code.
• Expertise in RAG architectures, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and LLM evaluation.
• Experience with ML infrastructure, including vector databases and embedding pipelines, in production.
• Must be based in or able to work onsite in New York City.

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic systems and orchestration tools like LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI.
• Background in NLP for multilingual legal, financial, or regulatory document processing.
• Knowledge of global payroll, employment law, or multi-jurisdictional compliance data.
• Previous experience as an early AI hire at a Series A-C company.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive base salary and significant equity in a high-growth, venture-backed company.
• Direct collaboration with the CEO and CTO in a focused, technical environment.
• Well-resourced AI infrastructure budget and access to frontier model APIs.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Dedicated learning and development budget.