AI Research Engineer

Tunic Pay
Tunic Pay

Software Engineering, Data Science

Posted on Nov 2, 2026
Apply now

We’re looking for an AI Research Engineer based in London to shape the next generation of Tunic Pay’s models, to determine a scam with multimodal unstructured data within the latency of the payments system. If you're excited about making the world a safer place and applying AI to the world of financial systems, read on to learn more ⬇️

About the role 🎭

You’ll work with the founders, product and engineering to make advanced AI Tunic Pay’s moat. You’ll own the models and the pipelines around them, and uplevel how the whole engineering team builds with AI. Early projects are likely to include:

Our own small language model. Fine-tune an open model on our fraud labels and run it inside the bank’s tenant and eventually cross-tenant.

Embeddings. Represent payments, counterparties and case evidence so our knowledge graph learns from every investigation.

Agentic workflows. Orchestrators, harnesses and tool-use for our investigation engine so that we can scale the resolution of alerts, alongside nuanced evals to keep looping improvements!

Enterprise reality. Tier-1 bank model governance, latency, on-prem/VM deployment, no clean data. Bank data scientists may be in the room.

Compute budget. You will have a GPU and compute budget. Happy to discuss details during the interview process.

Anything 🤷🏻‍♀️. This role will evolve quickly. Expect ambiguity, variety, and responsibility, the scope will likely change in six months.

About you 🤓

Here are some thoughts on who would be successful at the role. We know we won’t be able to assess these from your portfolio alone, but our interview process will be designed around them:

  • An Auto-didact: You may spend one day studying open banking payment rails and another learning how a fraud analyst triages an alert queue. You pick up new domains fast and turn what you learn into decisions, because no amount of knowledge today substitutes for the rate of future learning.
  • A Scientist who ships: You run real experiments with real baselines, and you know when “good enough, in prod” beats one more ablation.
  • A Structurer: You enjoy turning an open, ambiguous brief into something the team can act on. You structure your own work without waiting to be told.
  • A Force multiplier: You make the colleagues around you better at AI, through pairing & collaboration, reviews, experimentation, and the tooling you leave behind.

    • The hard skills we’ll value

    As we look at profiles, here’s what we’ll be scanning for:

  • Deep learning depth: you’ve trained or fine-tuned models (LLMs, embeddings, or both), not just prompted them. PhDs preferred / Publications welcome, but not required.
  • Production engineering: strong Python; you’ve shipped models and served them under latency constraints.
  • GenAI pipelines: agentic workflows, harnesses, evals, retrieval.
  • Entrepreneurial energy: smaller companies or research-to-product work; happy beyond a narrow research remit.
  • Domain exposure: not required, but fraud, payments, graphs or tabular ML preferred.

    • Not got 100% of qualifications? Research shows that women and under-represented minorities are less likely to apply for a role if they do not have 100% of the requirements. We’re paying attention to this, so please feel free to apply regardless (<2mins) or send us a note on info@tunicpay.com if you’d like to discuss if there’s a fit.

    About Tunic Pay 🎽

    Tunic Pay is building the Payment Context Protocol for all money movement; an intelligence layer that runs a real-time investigation on a payment, giving banks (and their customers) rich, explainable context on who they’re paying and why, so scams can be stopped and genuine payments can flow.

    At the core is an investigation engine that:

  • Classifies the payment and plans the next best questions/steps,
  • Runs a live, multi-source investigation across public, proprietary, and shared data (often unstructured, messy, and not available via clean APIs)
  • Returns risk signals and the right intervention, either breaking the spell for high-risk cases or releasing genuine payments faster while reducing operational burden.

    • This intelligence is delivered dynamically across the payment journey (embedded directly in digital banking flows, used by fraud agents, or triggered post-alert) enabling banks to intervene at the right moment, with the right message, for the right customer.

    As our intelligence compounds, our ambition is scale: to overlay the Payment Context Protocol on as many payments as possible (3.6 trillion payments annually) and make trusted, seamless transactions the default.

    Okay nice in theory but what about results…

    We’re early and moving fast. Tunic Pay is already working with some of the largest banks in the UK, with deployments expanding globally and delivering measurable reductions in scam losses and fraud operations workload.

    We have an incredible team of cyber/fintech/AI veterans (backgrounds at Cloudflare, Elliptic, Monzo, Palantir, Quantexa, Wise etc), and were lucky to have our Series A pre-empted.

    This is our opportunity to lose.

    About the team 👋

    Nicky (co-founder) previously co-founded Nova Credit, helping immigrants access credit. Served millions of immigrants, raised over $150M, 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.

    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 would often rather be climbing rocks 🧗‍♂️.

    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 🎸.

    Aida (head of product) has experience as former scientist herself (maths → biophysics PhD), specialising in applied AI with long stints at Faculty AI and the Turing Institute. Gymnastics child from Bosnia originally; passionate about building great teams.

    🍃 Our values

    Designer (12).jpeg

    Yes, and.

    This business needs creativity – we value well-channelled positivity (and the discomfort of ideation!) above intellectual scepticism.

    Designer (15).jpeg

    Change, and speed, is the only constant.

    We prize flexibility and velocity. We don’t overpromise on a single strategy or career path. Nor do we value effort (sorry!). Instead, we are focused on outcomes + efficiency⚡

    Memorable design.png

    Straight-shooters.

    We tell it like it is. To our customers, our investors, ourselves. There is no room for ethical shortcuts, and we’re taking the decades-long view.

    Designer (8).jpeg

    Pranksters, not fraudsters.

    We’re serious about our work, but not about ourselves. We delight in bringing a little troll spirit.

    Work dynamics

  • In person: 3+ days a week jamming together in our London office (Holborn). Fridays in particular together for team lunch & weekly reflections. Expect occasional time with bank customers for research and testing sessions.
  • Visa sponsorship: Yes!
  • Benefits: Bupa health insurance, Pension, tax-deductible nursery

    • Last but not least, 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/ CV and a portfolio link in the application link below (we don’t believe in cover letters or unnecessary work here!)
  • Mutual screening call (25mins): A call with Aida, or one of the cofounders. We'll cover your motivations, background, and what you're looking for - this is as much for you as it is for us!
  • A technical deep-dive on a deep learning model you have trained and/or shipped.
  • Virtual whiteboarding session (30 mins): A call with a member of the product team. No prep needed; we'll work through a real Tunic design problem together on a shared whiteboard, just as we would day-to-day. We're looking for how you think, not what you already know.
  • In-person task (2-3hrs): You come into our office to meet the wider team, take on a scoped problem and talk us through it, and gain an insight into Tunic’s day-to-day: the problem-solving, communication and fun (!).
  • References and offer: Ideally over dinner!

    • Compensation will vary based on experience and include equity (we will be using a standard methodology of determining total equity packages as 80% of one year’s salary)

    If you think you’d succeed at the role, apply here!

    Apply now
    See more open positions at Tunic Pay