We’re looking for a scrappy, experienced AI engineer based in London to join our fintech startup at the ground floor. This role is a good fit for those who are excited about independence, impact, and contributing to the battle against scams and financial crime. If this sounds like a match for you, read on to learn more ⬇️
Tunic Pay is building the Payment Context Protocol for all money movement—an intelligence layer that runs a real-time investigation on a payment, giving banks (and customers) rich context on the counterparty and situation so scams can be intercepted and genuine payments can flow.
At the core is an “investigation engine” that (1) classifies the payment and plans the next best questions/steps, (2) orchestrates a live, multi-source investigation (typically unstructured data that doesn’t live on clean APIs and has been enriched by fraud labels and feedback loops), and (3) returns risk scoring plus the right intervention—either to break the spell for high-risk cases or to reduce ops burden.
Our protocol is increasingly powered by specialized AI agents tasked with optimizing the consumer interaction, appropriately driving the investigation, and returning the right decision. Our approach to front-ends is highly modular /gottaCatchEmAll in order to power investigatory and experience flexibility, e.g., voice vs. chat or deterministic vs. not. And we need to deliver 24/7/365 uptime and security.
As our intelligence compounds, our ambition is scale: to overlay the Payment Context Protocol on as many payments as possible (3.6T payments annually) and make trusted, seamless transactions the default.
We are early & moving fast: we are working & have driven amazing results for some of the largest banks in the UK and increasingly globally🧤, we have an incredible team of cyber/fintech/AI veterans (backgrounds at Cloudflare, Elliptic, Monzo, Palantir, Quantexa, Wise etc), and were lucky to have our Series A pre-empted.
This is our opportunity to lose.
Nicky (co-founder) previously co-founded Nova Credit, helping immigrants access credit. We’ve served millions of immigrants, raised over $130M (GC, Index, KPCB), built a team of 100+ people across three continents. Before that it was Stanford MBA, Bain, international development, and Cambridge. 🇬🇷-🇬🇧 married to🇰🇷-🇺🇲, parent, intermittent reader/runner, smack talker.
Nico (co-founder) spent the last 4 years as CEO of Casai, LatAm’s largest short-term rental operator with almost 2k apartments in 🇲🇽 and 🇧🇷 and hosted >100k guests. Previously met Nicky as Nova Credit’s first biz hire right after the seed round. Started career @ BCG after studying at Yale 🐶 & Oxford. Born in 🇵🇭 & grew up in Memphis, TN, the birthplace of rock & roll 🎸.
Cyrus (Head of Engineering) has experience across a wide range of industries and has built large-scale systems in a variety of sensitive contexts from banking 🏦 to defence 🛡️. Has been working with Nicky and Nico since 2023. Ex-Palantir and Morgan Stanley, before that Imperial College. Statistically most likely to be found walking my dog 🐕 and climbing rocks 🧗♂️.
And here is a lil video about us as humans (feel free to watch @2x 🙈) 👇.
Here are some thoughts on who would be successful in the role. We know we won’t be able to assess these from your CV, but our interview process will be designed around them: