Staff AI Engineer

Package: £120 - 150k + meaningful equity

Location: London area / hybrid with 3 days a week in the office

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The people:

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AI enables small teams to achieve incredible outcomes. We are building a lean, but incredibly effective team.

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London is the epicentre of the financial services sector and we are building a talent dense team within the beating heart of the city. This sector isn’t new to our team, we have all had impressive success in the past, however, Covecta is just the start of the next chapter.

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Scott Wilson, CEO, previously VP EMEA at Mambu. During his 3 year tenure revenue increased from €30m to €130m, and the valuation charged to €4.7bn from €1.9bn.

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Ben Thomas, CRO, spent 2 years on the Mambu leadership team driving the global growth.

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Previously, 15 years with Accenture and McKinsey building the future of banking from within, selling ~£3m of consulting engagements per year.

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What are we building at Covecta?

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Covecta is an Agentic AI platform built specifically for financial institutions. Covecta's Agents solve real productivity bottlenecks across client serving teams and support teams within commercial banks, building societies, specialist lenders and private credit teams.

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Covecta's Agents and workflows are configured from within Covecta's studios to the organisation's specific needs and requirements. The Agents are controlled by Covecta’s purpose-built, Financial Services specific, orchestrator. They collect information from external data sources and internal systems and complete automated workflows and activities on behalf of users and teams across lead acquisition, origination and servicing.

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Covecta accelerates automation with human in the loop optionality and elevates productivity, enabling colleagues to serve customers more deeply and accelerate portfolio growth. It’s built to work with customers’ existing systems, integrates easily, and doesn’t require training on customer data.

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Imagine a world where every worker within this industry is multiplying their productivity.They are doing their best work, being productive and feeling fulfilled. This is what Covecta delivers.

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Where are we in our journey?

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We have come out of the gates fast.

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We launched an MVP in January’25. We went live in April’25 with our first paying customer, Metro Bank, and continued adding to this through the year. As of December’25 we have customers across both the UK and US, and multiple high value strategic partnerships which will accelerate our distribution.

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Our brand recognition is increasing and we have built a strong pipeline. We are now adding an additional Commercial Lead to accelerate our commercial execution. We have only achieved 0.01% of what we want. We have more to do, we want to execute at pace and build a destination business.

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The Role:

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We've gone from MVP to paying customers across the UK and US in under a year. Now the AI needs to get significantly smarter, more reliable, and broader. As Staff AI Engineer, you'll be the person making that happen, spanning everything from document intelligence and NLP through to agent orchestration and evaluation.
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This is not an LLM wrapper company. We are building a purpose-built AI platform that orchestrates dozens of specialised agents across the entire financial services lifecycle, from prospect sourcing and KYB/KYC screening, through credit underwriting and financial analysis, to covenant monitoring and distressed lending management. You will be a key leader of AI engineering at Covecta, shaping the architecture, the research direction, and the engineering culture that underpins everything we build.

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The range of what you'll touch is wide. Our platform demands deep NLP capability for document comprehension, policy interpretation, and financial narrative analysis. It requires OCR and intelligent document processing to extract structured data from bank statements, credit memos, valuation reports, and regulatory filings. And at the core of it all, you'll be advancing our agentic systems: the orchestration layer that coordinates multi-step, multi-agent workflows in high-stakes financial environments.

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There's a hard technical challenge at the centre of what we're building. Our agents operate in regulated financial services, making decisions that directly affect lending, compliance, and risk. The bar for accuracy, explainability, and auditability is extraordinarily high, and the current state of the art doesn't hand you those properties for free. Solving this means staying close to the research frontier: agent evaluation, structured reasoning, guardrail design, hallucination detection, and reliable multi-step decision-making are all active areas where the field is moving fast and the gap between what exists and what's needed is real. You'll be designing the frameworks and feedback loops that close that gap, turning emerging techniques into production systems that financial institutions can depend on.

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What you'll do:

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> Set the technical direction for AI engineering across the platform, from model selection and prompt architecture to agent orchestration and evaluation
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> Design and build the systems that power 50+ financial services agents spanning acquisition, screening, underwriting, fulfilment, and monitoring
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> Own the development of Covecta's agentic orchestration layer, the domain-specific engine that coordinates multi-agent workflows with human-in-the-loop oversight

> Push forward our NLP capabilities for financial document comprehension, policy mapping, and intelligent entity extraction
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> Build and improve OCR and document processing pipelines that handle the messy reality of financial paperwork: bank statements, credit applications, valuation reports, regulatory filings

> Define and implement alignment and evaluation frameworks, designing how we measure accuracy, detect hallucination, enforce policy compliance, and build auditable AI decision trails
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> Work directly with the founding team and customers to translate real-world banking workflows into technical architecture
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> Shape hiring and engineering culture as the AI team grows

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What you bring:

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Experience and depth. Multiple years of hands-on AI engineering experience, ideally across several of: NLP, document intelligence, agentic systems, information extraction, or applied ML. You've shipped production AI systems, not just prototypes.
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Architectural judgement. You've made consequential technical decisions, choosing between approaches, designing systems for reliability at scale, and knowing when to
build vs. integrate. You've worked across the stack, from model-level work to production infrastructure.
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Research instinct. You care about building AI that works correctly, not just impressively. You think about failure modes, edge cases, and evaluation rigour. You
stay close to the latest research and know how to turn emerging techniques into production systems. Experience with guardrails, evaluation pipelines, or structured output validation is highly valued.

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Breadth across AI. You're comfortable spanning NLP, OCR, agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and more. You don't need to be world-class in all of these, but you should be excited by the range and capable of going deep where needed.

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Ownership and pace. You're comfortable operating as a technical lead in a startup where the scope is broad and the pace is fast. You organise yourself, make decisions with incomplete information, and move quickly without sacrificing quality.
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Communication. You can explain complex technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders, including customers and investors. You'll be a visible representative of Covecta's technical capability.

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Financial services experience is a bonus but not required. What matters is that you're excited about applying serious AI engineering to a complex, high-stakes domain.

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Who are we looking for?

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> You bring professional pride

You have a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment derived from your work and career. You have a strong commitment to high standards, dedication to your craft, and a desire to excel.

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> You’re product obsessed

The product you build will redefine the way the financial services industry will operate. We are building leading AI solutions to solve mission critical activities and workflows. The industry won’t have felt an impact like this before, and this matters to you.

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> You bring the technical edge

You take pride in being on the forefront of innovation. You get a sense of satisfaction when ideas turn into reality. You are competent with the latest and greatest front end capabilities and tools. You crave complexity and run towards it.

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> You want to and can move fast

We are moving fast, but we need to move faster. You can help us do this. We are changing an industry, that doesn’t happen overnight, but the hard work starts now. Expect longer hours, the trade offs are worth it, because we enjoy it and we see the impact we are having.

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> You operate well within a team

You like to take ownership, you organise yourself, and work effectively alongside a team and all your stakeholders. The team will individually and collectively be
outstanding. We have our own office and it's our fun place to work.

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The package:

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Competitive salary: £120 - 150k

Generous equity: 0.4 - 1.0%

Private health insurance

Pension

Brand new MacBook

Annual offsite each year