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 ⬇️

About Tunic Pay 🎽

At Tunic Pay, we’re building the future of safe payments. Fraud costs UK consumers and businesses billions each year — and the payment experience is broken. We’re here to fix that, starting with trust during the transaction.

Our product helps people know who they’re really paying, right at the point of payment — so that confidence, not fear, defines online payments. We started the business in November 2023 when we closed our Seed Round, and are already working with some of the biggest banks in the UK to make this a reality. 🧤

We believe in strong in-person collaboration so are requiring 3+ days a week jamming together in our London office (Farringdon).

About us 👋

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 🙈) 👇.

https://youtu.be/l7jOlFlshWo

About you 🤓

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:

• Scrappiness: You autonomously drive value without the comforts of robust data infrastructure or huge training datasets. You navigate ambiguity to uncover insights through curiosity and with a bias to action.
• Breadth: You are unafraid of jumping into new terrain; you have a propensity for picking up new tools and technologies.
• Quality obsession: You understand how to build production-grade solutions and analytical workflows, and are comfortable applying that rigour at early stage.
• Problem-solving: You love ambiguous analytical problems, understand how to navigate data quality issues, and anticipate and effectively root cause failures. You have an eye for detail, can see around corners, and understand that prevention is the best cure.
• Impact: This isn’t a role for a pure researcher — we’re looking for someone who wants to ship real impact, not just papers or dashboards.

Some hard skills we’d value

• LLM & Gen-AI expertise: Hands-on experience designing and iterating on prompts, building RAG or agentic systems, and working with popular LLM frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face). Comfortable benchmarking and applying evaluation techniques (synthetic or human-in-the-loop) in production.
• Architecture & MLOps: Proven record automating the ML lifecycle — model / prompt / data pipelines (batch, streaming or real-time), and integrating them seamlessly into production systems.