Founding AI Engineer

Join a small, high-quality team and take big ownership in building the future of accounting with AI. We're looking for a skilled Senior AI Engineer to help us create a safe, transparent, and powerful AI teammate for finance professionals. If you love solving complex problems and shipping fast, you'll fit right in.

Location: London (hybrid) we work from the office 2-3 days each week.

Compensation: Proper salary + meaningful equity stake.

Visa sponsorship: Not available.

About Translucent

We're building the future of accounting with AI. We're reimagining how companies handle their finances by making AI a trusted teammate for finance teams: safe, transparent, and always with humans in control. If you want to create AI systems that are powerful, reliable, and actually useful at scale, this is the role for you.

Why Join Us

• High Impact, High Upside: Your work will have immediate impact, and you'll be rewarded accordingly with meaningful equity.
• Work on Something Important: We're changing how businesses handle their finances by giving them AI tools they can trust, edit and control.
• Real Traction: We already serve thousands of users, so you're joining something that's working and growing based on actual customer needs.

What Makes This Role Special

• Own Your Impact: Join a small, focused team where you get real ownership. You'll shape both the technical architecture and product direction, and your work will directly drive results.
• Build Something That Matters: Create AI-powered financial tools that finance teams can actually trust and rely on. We're building AI that works with humans, not against them. Transparency and user control are non-negotiable.
• Build on Solid Foundations: You'll be working with Translucent's existing platform, which already handles Xero and QuickBooks data for thousands of companies. You're not starting from scratch. You're taking something proven to the next level.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead Technical Design: Drive the architecture and development of production LLM applications and the infrastructure that powers AI agents.
• Build Quality Into Everything: Create evaluation systems that actually work. Curated test datasets, automated checks in CI, and release gates that catch problems before they hit users.
• Make It Safe and Compliant: Build the guardrails we need. Schema validation, PII scrubbing, content moderation, proper authorisation, and circuit breakers that prevent things from going sideways.
• Make RAG Work Better: Improve how we chunk documents, build indexes, handle search and retrieval, and optimise for speed, accuracy, and cost.

What We're Looking For

• Someone who is obsessed with building with AI.
• Someone who gets excited about solving hard problems and isn't afraid to try approaches that haven't been proven before.
• Solid backend and API development skills with 4+ years of experience, plus full-stack capabilities in TypeScript, Python, and Kotlin.
• Real experience shipping LLM applications or AI agents, and actually measuring how well they work using tools like LangSmith, Promptfoo, TruLens, DeepEval, Phoenix, or similar.
• Deep knowledge of prompt engineering, structured outputs, function calling, and RAG. Plus embeddings, vector databases, retrieval strategies, and how to measure if your AI is telling the truth.
• Experience building systems that handle sensitive business data securely, with proper observability and reliability.
• Strong communication skills, a sense of ownership, and comfort with the pace of startup life.