Founding Head of Financial Services

About this role

Job title: Founding Head of Financial Services

Location: London; 4 days in-office, 1 day wfh

Reports to: Chief Commercial Officer

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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.

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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.

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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

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WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST 6…