Founding AI Data Scientist

Overview

Application

The Role

We’re hiring a Founding AI Data Scientist to help define and build the intelligence layer at the core of Grand.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role with real ownership. You’ll work AI-first by default, using modern tools to accelerate analysis, experimentation, and iteration. The goal is to leverage complex, real-world data to make reliable, explainable, and useful decisions in practice.

This is not a research lab role and not a demo factory. You’ll be building AI that runs in production, influences real financial outcomes, and improves continuously over time. Judgment matters as much as modelling. Knowing where AI adds value and where it doesn’t is part of the job.

You’ll sit close to the founders, builders and creative teams, shaping how intelligence is designed, evaluated, and deployed across the platform. This is a seat at the founders’ table, helping define how AI is applied responsibly in a regulated, real-world environment.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build core AI and data systems that support decision-making across the platform
• Work with complex, imperfect, and evolving data from multiple internal and external sources
• Develop models and signals that balance accuracy, uncertainty, and explainability
• Help define how intelligence is represented, updated, and acted upon inside the product
• Decide when to use ML, statistical methods, rules, or hybrids, and why
• Partner closely with product and engineering so AI is embedded in workflows, not bolted on
• Establish standards for evaluation, monitoring, and iteration in production
• Use modern AI tooling, including LLMs where appropriate, with a bias toward leverage over novelty
• Collaborate with regulatory and compliance teams to ensure outputs are defensible and robust
• Move fast without being reckless, understanding the cost of false confidence

Must Have

• Strong grounding in statistics, probability, and applied machine learning
• Proven experience shipping AI or ML systems into production
• Experience working with non-ideal data where ground truth is partial, delayed, or noisy
• Comfort making trade-offs between precision, recall, confidence, and coverage
• Ability to reason about uncertainty and error, not just point predictions
• Clear communicator who can explain complex ideas to non-technical stakeholders
• Strong experience with Python and modern ML tooling
• Practical experience working with LLMs or advanced AI systems in real applications
• Bias toward building decision-support systems, not opaque black boxes
• High intellectual honesty and strong technical judgment

Nice to Have

• Experience building data science models or AI systems in fintech environments
• Exposure to credit, underwriting, or risk decisioning in real-world settings
• Experience operating in regulated or high-stakes domains
• Background working in early-stage or zero-to-one products
• Familiarity with data platforms, feature pipelines, or model monitoring
• Experience designing systems that evolve over time, not static models

Salary and Benefits

• Excellent Salary: Competitive and reflective of the responsibilities of a founding role
• Equity Options: Meaningful ownership in a long-term company
• Hybrid Work: At least 3 days in our London or Dublin office
• Extended Remote Work on Request: Outcomes matter more than optics
• Builders, Not Tourists: Work with people who care deeply about getting things right

Who You Are

You’re a builder with a scientist’s discipline. You’re excited by messy reality, not pristine datasets. You’re sceptical of hype and careful about claims.

You think in systems, not models in isolation. You understand that data reflects behaviour, incentives, and change over time. You design AI that improves gradually and fails gracefully.

You’ve seen what breaks when models leave the lab, and you design accordingly. You take responsibility for the impact of your work.

You prioritise trust, credibility, and long-term impact over clever tricks. You value correctness, clarity, and humility over novelty.

You thrive in ambiguity, enjoy hard problems with no obvious solution, and take pride in building AI that earns its place.

You’re based in Dublin or in close commuting distance (or ready to be), and ready to help build something genuinely new.

If this sounds like you, let’s talk.