Chief AI Engineer / Chief AI Officer / AI CTO / Head of AI

Chief AI Engineer / Chief AI Officer / AI CTO / Head of AI Fintech Client Technology & Product

Location: London (5 days/week in office, with flexibility when required) Full-time Reports to: CEO

The Opportunity

Our client is a financial technology company building investment vehicles for retail and institutional investors in the private markets, serving the world's leading asset managers, global banks, and alternative investment firms.

They are now building the next-generation platform to insource fund administration currently outsourced to third parties, transforming the company into the book of record. It is an AI-native enterprise SaaS product designed to slot plug-and-play into an established blue-chip client base, with commercial potential materially larger than the existing offering.

This is being built as a ring-fenced startup within a startup: a self-contained team operating under the CEO with full autonomy, backed by an established brand, funding, and enterprise client base. As Chief AI Engineer you will be the technical co founder, architecting and building the product from the ground up and hiring the team that ships it.

This is an entrepreneurial journey with real unknowns, ups and downs. We are looking for a builder who wants that.

Must Haves

These five are non negotiable:

• Entrepreneurial track record. You have built something from nothing, ideally as a founder or founding engineer. You are comfortable with ambiguity, thrive without process, and know what it takes to go from zero to product.
• Proven leadership. Deep experience hiring and building world class technical teams from scratch, and developing them into high performers.
• Intense systems architecture expertise. Serious architectural depth across databases, middleware, cloud infrastructure, and system integration. You design systems and write code today, not from a distance.
• Azure. Strong working knowledge of the Microsoft ecosystem: Azure, Azure AI Foundry, data services, and cloud infrastructure. Must have, not nice to have.
• AI native development. Deeply embedded in the new phase of AI software engineering, sometimes called AI SDLC or AI DLC. AI first across the full lifecycle: coding, testing, workflow automation, and data processing. Shipping AI native products, not AI augmented ones.

The Role

You will own the technical architecture end to end, leveraging our client's existing Azure infrastructure and data lake while making independent calls on new tooling. You will ship at startup speed, take an AI first approach to every layer of the product, make build vs buy decisions across the stack, and hire and lead a small, high calibre team alongside a business lead and the CEO.

The product covers investor onboarding, KYC/AML, share register management, and fund administration, built as a scalable enterprise SaaS offering for large financial institutions.

Nice to Have

Domain knowledge in financial services would be valuable: KYC/AML, fund administration, investor onboarding, share registries, or private markets infrastructure, and experience integrating third party compliance and identity verification tooling. Not required, but it would shorten the run up.

A Note on Confidentiality

Our client's name is not disclosed at this stage. Full details, including the company name and strategic context, are shared with shortlisted candidates once an initial conversation with We Are Agentic has taken place and both sides agree to progress.