Founding AI Engineer at Diligent | Y Combinator
👋 About us
At Diligent, we are on a mission to help fintechs and banks automate and enhance due diligence 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 (https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/KQK-diligent-genai-assistant-for-fintech-risk-and-compliance-operations)
💼 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:
Evolve schemas and bring structure to non-deterministic outputs.
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.
Hire, onboard, and nurture future teammates.
Our tech stack
NodeJS
Python
Typescript
React
AWS Serverless
🤓 About you
Curious — You have a deep passion for understanding and solving complex problems. You enjoy diving deep into customer challenges and finding innovative solutions.
Driven — Early-stage startups require dedication and hard work - this isn't a 9-5 role. We need committed people who are ready to put in the effort to build something extraordinary. You should be self-motivated and thrive on challenges.
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.
Humble — You know your strengths but also recognize there's always more to learn. You're confident in your abilities while remaining open to new perspectives and approaches.
Empathetic — You excel at understanding both customer and team needs. You actively listen, share feedback constructively, and create an environment where everyone feels heard. You're able to put yourself in others' shoes, whether they're team members or customers.
Budget
Base salary £ 80k-£120k
Equity: 0,5 - 2,0%
⏳ 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.
Initial application (<2 mins): Submit your LinkedIn (or CV) in the application link below
CTO meet-and-greet (30 mins): Introductory call with Ahmed — get to know each other a little
Technical interview (60-90 mins): Deepdive interview with Ahmed focusing on problem solving, coding proficiency, systems design and architecture.
CEO meet-and-greet (30 mins): Introductory call with Edo — get to know each other
References and offer: Ideally over dinner!
