Applied AI Lead

Role overview

Alternative Payments is expanding its fintech platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses bring fragmented tools into one financial operating system. After building a strong accounts receivable product for MSPs over the past five years, the company is now broadening into accounts payable and AI-driven analytics to improve how service businesses manage finances.

In this position, you will lead the AI layer that supports internal workflows and business operations. This is a practical, hands-on leadership role focused on creating agentic automations with Claude Code and MCPs to reduce manual effort across finance and support. You will also define the technical standards, system design, and security controls for AI-native infrastructure across the organization.

Key impact areas

• Build and roll out end-to-end agentic workflows that speed up operational processes.
• Own the company’s internal AI stack, including model choice, vendor assessment, and reusable MCP integrations.
• Set the technical bar for AI security, including defenses against prompt injection and robust access management for agent-based systems.
• Work closely with the founders on architecture decisions and help raise AI fluency across the company.

What makes this opportunity stand out

• This is a high-impact building role, not a research position or a people-management track.
• You will be joining a business at an important growth stage as it evolves from a niche solution into a broader financial operating system.
• You will have direct influence on company-wide technical direction and AI adoption.

Candidate profile

The ideal hire brings a strong record of delivering production-ready AI systems and has worked in bizops, engineering, or data for at least 6 years. Deep familiarity with prompt engineering, context engineering, and the trade-offs between RAG, fine-tuning, and long-context approaches is important. Practical experience with MCP servers and agent workflows is also expected, especially where they solve real business logic challenges.

Additional details

This role is based in New York, USA. Compensation is listed at $150k-$200k plus equity. The hiring process is being run by an AI recruiter on behalf of the company, and the next step is an introductory conversation with Jack.

Recruitment context

The role is being sourced through Jack & Jill’s AI-assisted recruiting workflow. Jack helps candidates with job discovery, guidance, and interview support, while Jill works with companies to identify strong matches from Jack’s network. If there is a fit, the company will make the introduction directly.

Important note

This is a real open position. In some cases, client details may be partially anonymized in the public listing, which can make the posting feel incomplete, but it remains an active hiring search.