Founding Head of Financial Services

Job description

Job title: Founding Head of Financial Services Location: London; 4 days in-office, 1 day wfh Reports to: Chief Commercial Officer _____________________________________________________________________ COSINE AT A GLANCE Cosine is the UK's frontier AI lab for autonomous software engineering — not another coding assistant, but our own models, agent stack, eval harnesses, and product layer. We build our agent tooling entirely in-house and post-train open-source models to deliver reliable, enterprise-grade coding performance in security-critical settings. Our offerings can be used as SaaS, deployed on VPC, on-prem or fully air-gapped. Through this flexability, we are able to service large-scale, highly regulated enterprises and industries including defence, financial service and healthcare. We’re backed by YC and were recently selected for the UK’s sovereign AI programme. The company is at a rare stage: deep technical work, real enterprise pull, and a chance to shape how AI is deployed inside defence, banking, government, and other high-trust environments. ___________________________________________________________________________ MISSION Own Cosine’s financial services engagement and GTM motion from founder-led relationship building into a repeatable commercial engine. The role exists to turn Cosine’s current sovereign AI momentum with banks, insurers, market infrastructure firms, payments companies, and other regulated financial institutions into deep executive relationships, clearly understood customer priorities, and qualified commercial opportunities. This is a critical sector-building role: part enterprise sales, part partnerships, part market development, part community-building, and part GTM leadership. _____________________________________________________________________ CORE RESPONSIBILITIES 1. LEAD ENGAGEMENT WITH FINANCIAL SERVICES COALITION PARTNERS AND TARGET ENTERPRISES - Own Cosine’s day-to-day engagement with financial services organisations already involved in the sovereign AI coalition. - Build new relationships with other priority FS enterprises, including banks, insurers, payments networks, asset managers, exchanges, infrastructure providers, and technology leadership teams inside major financial institutions. - Maintain a clear account map across key organisations, including executive sponsors, technical champions, innovation leads, procurement stakeholders, risk/compliance owners, and engineering decision-makers. - Move relationships from broad sovereign AI interest into specific, practical areas where Cosine can create value. 2. BUILD MULTI-THREADED SENIOR RELATIONSHIPS - Develop relationships across multiple divisions, business units, and seniority levels in each target account. - Engage CIO, CTO, CISO, engineering, platform, architecture, innovation, digital transformation, risk, compliance, procurement, and business-line stakeholders. - Identify how priorities differ across teams, for example technology productivity, software assurance, secure AI deployment, operational resilience, model governance, cost reduction, and legacy modernisation. - Build enough trust that Cosine becomes part of the strategic conversation. 3. BUILD COSINE’S UNDERSTANDING OF FS SOVEREIGN AI PRIORITIES - Run structured discovery across financial services organisations to understand what they truly care about in sovereign AI. - Capture use cases, constraints, buying triggers, objections, governance requirements, security expectations, deployment models, and success metrics. - Translate customer signal into internal intelligence for sales, product, research, engineering, marketing, and leadership. - Build a sector view of where Cosine has the strongest right to win, including priority use cases, highest-intent accounts, likely buyer personas, and repeatable commercial narratives. 4. BUILD TOWARDS COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITIES - Convert relationship-building and market education into qualified pipeline opportunities. - Identify where there is a real business problem, budget owner, technical champion, procurement path, and reason to act now. - Shape opportunities into concrete next steps: workshops, technical deep-dives, discovery sessions, pilots, proof-of-concepts, deployment planning, or commercial proposals. - Work with wider GTM team to move qualified FS opportunities through the sales cycle. - Keep a clear view of account status, stakeholder map, open actions, risks, next steps, and commercial likelihood. The role should focus deeply on commercial pull: serious conversations, mapped accounts, live opportunities, pilots, and ultimately revenue. 5. ORGANISE JOINT EVENTS AND RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING FORUMS - Design and run high-quality FS-focused events (e.g. roundtables) that deepen relationships and create market signal. - Organise closed-door roundtables, private dinners, technical briefings, executive sessions, partner workshops, and coalition follow-ups. - Use events to move beyond generic AI discussion and into specific FS themes: sovereign deployment, governed software engineering, AI assurance, legacy systems, risk, resilience, and operational control. 6. HELP BUILD THE GTM TEAM IN FINANCIAL SERVICES - Help define what the FS GTM motion should become as Cosine scales. - Build the early playbook for account selection, stakeholder mapping, discovery, qualification, event-led selling, partner-led entry, pilot design, and commercial progression. - Help recruit, onboard, and develop future GTM hires focused on financial services. - Establish the operating cadence for the sector: account reviews, pipeline tracking, event follow-up, customer insight capture, and internal reporting. - Work closely with SDRs, partnerships, marketing, founders, and enterprise sales to make FS a repeatable vertical _____________________________________________________________________ WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST 6 MONTHS - Multi-threaded relationships established across the most important accounts. - The three top priority accounts are established, including existing coalition partners and new high-priority targets, and business cases set out. - A structured view of FS sovereign AI use cases, buyer priorities, objections, and buying triggers. - Qualified opportunities progressing into discovery, technical deep-dives, pilots, or commercial proposals. - A clear FS GTM playbook that future hires can build from. _____________________________________________________________________ SUCCESS METRICS RELATIONSHIP AND MARKET DEVELOPMENT - Number of priority FS accounts actively engaged. That said, depth is more important than raw number here. - Number of senior stakeholder relationships built across target accounts. - Number of multi-threaded accounts with executive, technical, and commercial coverage. - Quality of customer insight captured on sovereign AI priorities, deployment requirements, and use cases. COMMERCIAL PROGRESSION - Qualified FS opportunities created. - Workshops, technical deep-dives, pilots, or proposals initiated. - Pipeline generated or influenced. - Conversion of coalition engagement into live commercial next steps. - Evidence that Cosine is becoming a serious strategic partner in target accounts. TEAM AND OPERATING SYSTEM - FS account map and stakeholder tracker built and maintained. - Repeatable cadence established for account reviews, event follow-up, and sector reporting. - Future FS GTM hiring profile defined. _____________________________________________________________________ COSINE’S RESPONSIBILITIES Cosine will support the role with: - Founder access for senior meetings and strategic accounts. - Existing coalition relationships and warm routes into relevant FS organisations. - Support from partnerships, marketing, product, engineering, ML, and legal where needed. - Enterprise-grade materials on sovereign AI, deployment models, security, product architecture, and ROI. - Budget for high-signal dinners, roundtables, workshops, and customer events. - Clear internal ownership for technical escalation, pilot scoping, legal/procurement, and product feedback. - A single accountable line manager for commercial direction and prioritisation. _____________________________________________________________________ CANDIDATE PROFILE This role is likely to suit someone who: - Has sold, partnered, or built relationships inside financial services, ideally with banks, insurers, payments firms, exchanges, or regulated infrastructure providers. - Can credibly engage senior stakeholders while still doing the account-by-account follow-up work themselves. - Understands complex enterprise buying cycles and knows how to move from relationship to qualified opportunity. - Is comfortable with ambiguity, sector-building, and founder-led GTM rather than inheriting a mature sales machine. - Can organise high-signal executive events and turn them into commercial momentum. - Thinks commercially, writes clearly, and can build account plans, briefing notes, proposals, and internal decision materials without heavy supervision. - Has the judgement to know when a conversation is just interesting and when it is becoming real pipeline. _____________________________________________________________________ SUMMARY The Founding Head of Financial Services should make Cosine impossible to ignore for the right FS organisations. They should understand what these institutions actually need from sovereign AI, build the relationships required to be taken seriously, create the forums where those conversations happen, and turn that trust into qualified commercial opportunities. Over time, they should also build the team, playbook, and operating cadence that make financial services a repeatable Cosine vertical rather than a founder-led experiment. _____________________________________________________________________ WHY JOIN COSINE - Opportunity to sell a genuinely differentiated product into mission-critical defence and national security environments - Meaningful early equity with real upside - Direct impact on product direction and go-to-market strategy - Small, elite team with high standards and strong technical depth - What you can expect: - Competitive salary, benchmarked to the market - Equity / share options, so you share in the upside you help create - 30 days’ holiday + bank holidays - Work hard in the office, collaborate closely, and switch off properly - Dog-friendly office - bring your dog to work - Weekly team breakfast & lunch - Monthly socials - Pension - High-quality equipment to do your best work _____________________________________________________________________ EQUAL OPPORTUNITY We’re an equal opportunity employer. We value diverse backgrounds and encourage applications from everyone who meets the role requirements, even if you don’t tick every box.