Overview:
Lead a team of highly dedicated developers in a company at the forefront of automating mid-level financial services roles in the UK and the US. As an early stage start up, the role of CTO is more akin to being a tech cofounder in a team very competent developers. The position is fully remote with most of our team in the UK but also in the US/EU and UAE. While the salary at 70k+ GBP is negotiable as a key decision maker the majority of the remuneration comes from equity (300k+). We are looking for a gifted engineer and key decision maker who is very comfortable on the backend to fit in with the rest of the team. If interested, details on how to apply are at the bottom of this page.
Who we are:
Our vision to provide end to end automation for documents that have a high cost per hour for advisor services and banking in the UK/US. We are unique in our approach in that we provide value to LLMs without using an AI agent, or the typical RAG techniques for data retrieval instead embracing a hybrid using LLMs in a programmatic way. Our typical philosophy is to reduce the cognitive load of the user and still provide a highly technical and useable output that one might expect from a mid-level subject matter expert (paraplanner, advisor, AML/CTF …). We aim to complete our roadmap in the UK in 2025 and move cross-sector and expand to the US (first in financial advice and then banking).
We have a team of 11 right now with QA, sales, marketing, tech founder regularly on the backend/sales co-founder and senior exec from second largest payment distribution company in the UAE.
- We have managed to take nondeterministic LLMs and get consistent and reliable outputs
- We have a modern codebase using LLMs beyond prompt engineering (which is used minimally)
- You will have the ability to write impactful code with a company starting in the UK, and then expanding to the US in 2025
- You will be working with the most recent LLM release features to improve our product
- We have a structured JSON output that is model agnostic (for reference only OpenAI has structured outputs that can only use 2 OpenAI models, we can use any such as Claude, Llama etc)
- We have a recently launched product with a 90% close rate due to very strong PMF
What we are looking for:
- Gifted problem solver first and foremost
- Innovative solutions should come easy, you will be leading a team of talented problem solvers it's important you'll be able to guide them
- Language agnostic (while being proficient in Java)
- DSLs, multi-threaded solutions, parallelism, architecture should come second nature
- Gravitate the codebase from an architectural perspective towards our roadmap
- High amount of output.
- You should have prior experience in start-ups with a least 6 years' experience in backend development
- Proficient at least in understanding the usage of LLMs in a codebase
- Knowledge of financial services is a plus but not essential
Tech stack/info:
- AWS
- OpenAI/Anthropic LLMs
- Java Spring boot backend / Typescript on FE (although we have FE devs so not a concern)
- SQL
- Mid-sized codebase (well-maintained little tech debt at present for a rapidly growing start up, could probably have more strategically added tech debt).
- CICD through AWS
- AWS serverless architecture
- Prod/QA/Dev environments (deployed to these environments 1-2 times a week)
What we can offer:
- £70,000+ per annum salary (open to discussion)
- Significant equity (£300,000+ in equity at pre-launch valuation, understanding our PMF, outlook and your buy-in is imperative)
- Fully remote position from any country (although we are a UK based company, meet ups may be required).
- Liberal cost coverage for any software needed on the job (IntelliJ, LLM subscriptions…)
- 25 days holiday
- 10% profit sharing from small pool of devs
- The ability to work on a codebase that will drastically re-shape the financial services industry
The role:
- You will start leading a team of three senior backend developers and two front enders that require little assistance to help you with implementation.
- You are expected to be hands-on adding significant contributions to the code-base in the beginning.
- While we have a roadmap we wish to achieve, you are encouraged to be your own visionary from a technical perspective with the objective to becoming a subject matter expert and innovative leader in your own right in the domain of subject level expert automation
- You will help us scale as we grow as a company
- You will be responsible for the quality of our future hires and our team (with whatever support you need)
- Your role will be to work with the director and team lead who will provide you full support to make sure you have what you need to succeed.
- You will be a key decision maker taking over from the founder for oversight of the project from a tech standpoint
Company culture:
- We are an international company with people from EU/US/UK
- We meet briefly 5x a week in the morning online, meetings are scheduled as needed
- We work together, no-one gets stuck, we are here to help each other
- We highly value output
How to apply:
- Send a request for our coding exercise at the following endpoint using a GET request: https://openings.automwrite.co.uk/apply/takehome
- If you need an API key for an LLM you can also book a meeting and we will provide one with the details applied in the GET request on the /takehome endpoint.
- To submit your response with your repo, please POST to the following endpoint preferably in a .JSON but other formats are acceptable: https://openings.automwrite.co.uk/apply
- In your POST response, if you could please provide a link to your repo with your preferred method of contact with a link to your LinkedIn or CV (can also be included as JSON), whichever is easier.
- Please use "file" as key and your response as the value in your form-data.
- Please note this exercise is a short excerpt of the type of problems we regularly encounter and meant to provide an acclimation of our day to day.
- Any issues don't hesitate to reach out to team@automwrite.co.uk
Next steps:
1- Video call to review code
2 - Follow up with design and leadership questions
3 - We may follow up with paid (at your desired rate) paired programming for the final candidates if the prior results are inconclusive
Due to the number of candidates we apologize in advance if we do not get back to you. You should expect a response within 5-7 days if we intend to proceed. We thoroughly review every application.
