Lead Ai Engineer

About FinomFinom is a European tech startup headquartered in Amsterdam, and we’re on a journey towards revolutionizing the financial landscape for entrepreneurs worldwide. Our mission is to develop an all-in-one financial B2B solution that integrates banking functions, accounting, financial management, and invoicing into a seamless, mobile-first platform.
We recently closed a €115 million Series C equity round (around $133 million), bringing our total funding to approximately $346 million. This significant investment follows a $105 million growth funding round from General Catalyst, a long‑term backer since 2021 known for supporting companies like Airbnb, HubSpot, KAYAK, and Stripe.
Finom's platform goes beyond traditional banking, offering invoicing and a growing suite of features, including AI-enabled accounting, aiming to simplify financial management for entrepreneurs. We're actively expanding our reach across key EU markets like Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain.
At Finom, we’re not just redefining the entrepreneurial experience — we’re empowering our employees to make a real difference. Your work matters, and your impact extends far beyond product metrics. We nurture innovation and an inspiring work environment where bold ideas thrive, prioritizing thorough research, swift implementation of solutions, and ensuring that every effort we make benefits our users, employees, partners, and our business as a whole.
Maintaining our start‑up spirit, we prioritize thorough research, swift implementation of solutions, and ensuring that every effort we make benefits our users, employees, partners, and, of course, our business.
Lead AI EngineerThis is a leadership role from day one. You will set the technical and quality bar, lead a team of AI engineers, and stay hands‑on in the code. You have done this before — we are not looking for someone stepping into technical leadership for the first time.
You will build AI services for Finom customers, and internal platform solutions that allow other teams to ship AI capabilities of their own. You take architecture responsibility for the services you and your team develop, along with the alignment that comes with it — translating between business intent and technical reality, and challenging product decisions when they are wrong.
This is not a research role. It is a hands‑on engineering leadership role focused on production‑grade AI capabilities that create clear value for customers and the business.
What You Will Be DoingLead a team of AI engineers — set direction, review designs, and grow their technical scope through review, pairing, and design guidanceOwn the architecture for the services you and your team develop — and write down the decisions, tradeoffs, and rejected alternatives so they can be reviewed and challengedBuild and ship AI-powered customer and internal solutions using LLMs, RAG, tool calling, workflows, and agentic patternsOwn AI systems end to end — problem framing, implementation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iterationDevelop scalable and reliable inference pipelines with strong attention to latency, cost, security, and observabilitySet the evaluation and quality bar — offline evals, online signals, failure analysis, and continuous improvement loops that other teams adopt rather than renegotiate per projectDesign AI systems with auditability, model governance, and EU AI Act obligations built in from the start rather than retrofittedDrive AI platform and tooling decisions that improve reuse, speed, and consistency across teamsPartner with solution managers, domain teams, and engineers to integrate AI into real workflows rather than isolated demosTell a product stakeholder when the thing they asked for is the wrong solution, and be persuasive about the right oneNegotiate scope and sequencing with domain teams that have their own roadmaps and no obligation to yoursDecide what to stop doing — deprecate, simplify, or kill approaches that the evidence no longer supportsShape the roadmap rather than only execute ticketsWho You AreA leader who earns authority through technical credibility rather than titleStill an engineer at heart — close enough to the code and the designs to have an opinion worth defendingComfortable being accountable for outcomes you did not personally buildSomeone who has held a technical position against pushback, revised it when the pushback was right, and can tell the differenceDirect with stakeholders and with your team — you surface problems early, including the ones that reflect badly on your own decisionsDecisive under ambiguity: you make the call on incomplete information and revisit it when better information arrivesClear in writing — able to make a technical argument that a non-engineer can follow and act onProduct‑minded and focused on real user outcomes, not just model outputsCurious, low‑ego, and biased toward action; motivated by what the team ships, not only by what you ship yourselfMust‑HavesProven exper