Oscar
Head of Engineering
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Head of Engineering
Location: London
Salary: £190,000-220,000
Contract: Permanent
Working pattern: In office 3 to 5 days a week, working with colleagues in London and Bengaluru
A new enterprise software venture, built inside a long-established, founder-owned financial services business, is hiring its senior technical leader to take the platform through its V2 launch in early 2027. You will own the architecture end to end, lead an existing engineering organisation in Bengaluru and build a new 17-person engineering team in London. The role reports into the Executive Committee and sits alongside the Heads of Product Management and Product Design.
The Role
Investment firms can buy AI models off the shelf. This venture exists because trusting one with confidential data and a live deal is much harder than it looks. As the senior technical voice, you lead hands-on and make the hard technical calls.
- Report to the Executive Committee and work alongside the Heads of Product Management and Product Design.
- Own the architecture and hold the authority to change it.
- Lead the existing engineering organisation in Bengaluru and shape a new 17-person UK engineering team.
- Decide the sequence and the trade-offs, shipping V2 in your first year against explicit release criteria.
About the Venture
This is a startup inside a business that has been running the analytical work behind private capital for around twenty years.
- A long-established, founder-owned services business of significant scale, working with hundreds of clients across the private capital industry.
- The next chapter moves the business from services to software, from one firm's workflows to an industry's, and from executing investment decisions to shaping how they get made.
- Around thirty people in London today - small, senior and working with day-one founder intensity.
Architecture and Data
- You own the platform end to end.
- Own integrations with clients' CRM, portfolio monitoring, ERP and fund administration systems, and the data beneath them.
- Set a technology roadmap you can defend.
- Draw service boundaries around data ownership and keep the transactional core separate from the AI engine.
- Make boundaries explicit through schema-first API and event contracts, versioned artefacts and contract tests, so breaking changes surface before release.
- Build where it differentiates the product and buy the rest.
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The Engineering Standard
- Establish CI, automated testing, code review, trunk-based development and deploy-on-merge.
- Make the platform operable through tracing, alerting, incident response and runbooks.
- Keep risks visible to the Executive Committee.
Enterprise Trust
- The platform holds confidential investment data, so the security model is yours to own and defend.
- Own identity, token architecture, permissions, tenant isolation and an audit trail of agent actions.
- Lead readiness for SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001:2022 (both already held by the parent business), working with its compliance team.
- Prepare for ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act.
- Lead client security reviews: show buyers the isolation holds and name the gaps that remain.
AI Quality and Economics
- Own retrieval, agentic workflows and permission-aware context.
- Gate changes to prompts, retrieval and agent behaviour on golden datasets and automated evaluations before release.
- Make latency, agent-state durability and token cost visible by tenant and feature, so you can say what a change improves, what it costs and how a regression would be spotted.
The Organisation
- Lead principal and lead engineers, a solution architect and a QA function in Bengaluru.
- Build the London team across machine learning, front and back end, cloud and solution architecture, and cybersecurity.
- Hold both locations to one bar.
- Partner with Product Management on feasibility, sequencing and cost.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years leading engineering teams, including hiring strong engineers and running delivery across more than one location.
- Ownership of the architecture of a multi-tenant enterprise platform, with the ability to explain your boundary decisions, the trade-offs you accepted and what you would change.
- Comfortable across the JVM and Python - leadership is weighted above years in any single framework.
- Able to defend a platform's security model to regulated buyers.
- A track record of raising a team's engineering standard, with evidence that engineers adopted it.
- Experience shipping LLM or agentic systems into production with evaluation built in from the start.
- A degree in engineering, computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
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Nice to Have
None of these are required.
- Financial services or another regulated industry, where security diligence can decide whether a customer buys.
- LangGraph, MCP and graph-backed retrieval.
- AWS at production scale with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.
- Taking an enterprise platform from pilots to broad deployment.
- Daily use of AI coding tools such as Cursor or Claude Code, and a view on where they help.
The Reality
This will be difficult, and it is worth being clear about why.
- The work demands pace and accuracy: autonomous systems are being built inside high-stakes live businesses, where decisions carry real consequences and waiting for full agreement is not always an option.
- The systems will sometimes get things wrong. In this phase the London team creates the evaluations, visibility and safeguards that catch mistakes early, reduce them over time and stop the same failures recurring.
- The prize is building the foundations of an enterprise-grade platform aimed at a multi-billion-dollar serviceable market, with equity to share in that growth.
The Interview Process
You will be asked about three pieces of your work:
- An architecture decision with real consequences: your choice, your reasons and the result.
- An engineering standard you raised: how engineers came to adopt it and what improved.
- An AI system you made dependable: how you evaluated it, enforced permissions and detected failures.
Compensation and Practical Details
- All-inclusive package typically £190,000 - £220,000 per year, depending on experience, with scope to go beyond this in exceptional cases.
- Meaningful equity in the venture on top.
- London - in office 3 days a week, with colleagues in London and Bengaluru.
- Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
- The process aims to conclude within three weeks, and interview adjustments are available on request.
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