Founding ML engineer

👋 About us

At Diligent, we are on a mission to help fintechs and banks automate and enhance Anti-Money Laundering operations with AI agents. Leading banks and payment companies use us to automate risk investigations they run when onboarding and monitoring business customers in Europe, Middle East, USA and Asia.

Our founders have built fraud and credit risk models protecting billions in transactions at Europe’s top fintechs, and we’re taking that experience to revolutionize how financial institutions verify the legitimacy of businesses. With deep expertise in AI-driven risk assessment, we turn unstructured data into powerful insights, helping our customers automate manual reviews, strengthen fraud detection, and improve the onboarding experience for legitimate businesses.

We already work with leading fintech unicorns and banks, are growing fast and we’re looking for ambitious problem-solvers who are excited about using AI to tackle financial crime at a global scale. If you're passionate about making a real impact in the fight against fraud, we’d love to have you on our team! 🚀

More on us here:

Launch YC: Diligent - GenAI assistant for fintech risk and compliance operations | Y Combinator

💼 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:

• Bring order to chaos and begin taming the beast of modern machine learning
• 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.

Our tech stack

• NodeJS
• Python
• Typescript
• React
• AWS Serverless

🤓 About you

• Extremely Curious — We think curious people run the world. We love those who have an insatiable hunger for more knowledge… about the customer problems, domain knowledge, technical innovations or new ways to approaches to challenges.
• Hungry and driven — We are an early stage startup… this is hard and intense work that requires you to be ready to move fast, take bets and find solutions to problems that haven’t really been solved before. it will be tough but extremely rewarding
• A true owner — We don’t expect you to be just an employee, you will be part of the founding team. A strong sense of ownership and autonomy is essential - you’ll take full responsibility for your projects from start to finish and you’ll be expected to deal with ambiguity getting things done without overcomplicating solutions.
• Humble — You listen actively, embrace feedback and foster a collaborative environment where ideas are shared openly. You are confident in your expertise while recognising the value of learning from others and adapting to change.
• Pragmatic — Building something new requires multiple iterations and attempts. You understand that perfect is the enemy of good, and you're able to find practical solutions without overcomplicating things. You focus on getting things done and learning from each iteration.

Budget

• Base salary £75k-£90k
• Equity: 0.5 - 1%

⏳ The interview process

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.

1. Initial application (<2 mins): Submit your LinkedIn (or CV) in the application link below
2. CTO meet-and-greet (30 mins): Introductory call with Ahmed — get to know each other a little
3. Technical interview (60-90 mins): Deepdive interview with Ahmed focusing on problem solving, coding proficiency, systems design and architecture.
4. CEO meet-and-greet (30 mins): Introductory call with Edo — get to know each other
5. References and offer: Ideally over dinner!