---
title: 'Founding Head of Financial Services at Cosine'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-head-of-financial-services-cosine-london-7tsya8rtm36k'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Founding Head of Financial Services at Cosine

- **Company:** Cosine
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-31
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cosine/e21443fd-ce2c-4096-a3bd-aa9c8c466786

## 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

## About Cosine

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Cosine is a sovereign AI frontier lab and developer of Lumen, a specialist coding model and fully agentic software engineering system that outperforms generalist models on real-world code tasks.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Venture-backed)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Yang Li, Alistair Pullen, Sam Stenner

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence, Software Development
- **Target Customers**: Enterprise, Defense, Finance, Government, Healthcare, and other high-security, high-trust environments (B2B)
- **Mission**: Build sovereign AI engineering systems that serious teams can rely on in secure environments where reliability, privacy, and control matter most.

## Products & Services
- **Lumen (Model Family)**: A specialist family of AI models trained exclusively on production-quality code. Outperforms generalist models (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek) on code benchmarks. Includes variants:
    - **Scout** (8B parameters): Fast, on-device, for in-repo context.
    - **Outpost**: Post-trained from Kimi K2.6, optimized for enterprise and niche languages (COBOL, Fortran, Verilog, Rust, complex SQL).
    - **Frontier**: Highest-performing model (coming soon), achieving 59.3% on internal Niche-Bench vs. GPT-5.4 (47.4%).
- **Cosine Agent**: A fully agentic SWE that allows users to work on tickets asynchronously. Operates within a terminal-native interface, with multi-agent orchestration, MCP tool access, and a local-to-remote execution model.
- **Cosine Cloud**: Fully managed public cloud offering for teams.
- **Enterprise Deployment**: Managed single-tenant cloud and fully air-gapped on-premise deployments for maximum security.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of **$1.0M** (as of latest data); Total Funding of **$3.0M**.
- **Funding History**:
    - Pre-Seed (Nov 2022): $500K, led by Y Combinator (W23 batch).
    - Seed (Aug 2024): $2.5M, led by UpHonest Capital and Soma Capital (6 investors).
    - Grant (Apr 2026): 1 investor.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator, UpHonest Capital, Soma Capital; Member of UK government’s £500M **Sovereign AI programme**; granted access to the **Isambard-AI** supercomputer.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount has grown **60.9% YoY** (to ~23 employees); has assembled a UK Sovereign AI coalition of defense, infrastructure, financial, and healthcare leaders. Models have topped public benchmarks for two consecutive years.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Specialist-Over-Generalist Moat**: Lumen is a model trained exclusively on production code, not general text; this leads to significantly better results on code benchmarks (e.g., 59.3% on Niche-Bench vs. GPT-5.4’s 47.4%).
- **Sovereign AI**: First company to train, own, and deploy a fully sovereign AI model entirely on UK soil. This is a critical differentiator for defense, national security, and critical infrastructure where foreign AI is legally off the table.
- **Full-Stack In-House Build**: Owns the entire stack (models, agent infrastructure, evaluation, product surfaces, deployment) allowing deep integration and rapid iteration.
- **Real-World Deployment**: Deployed in air-gapped, on-premise environments for security-conscious customers who cannot use cloud-based AI.

## Strategic Focus
- **Sovereign AI Leadership**: Deepening its role as Britain’s national AI champion, working with the UK government on the £500M Sovereign AI programme.
- **Enterprise & Government Sales**: Expanding into defense, finance, infrastructure, and healthcare with secure, private deployments.
- **Pushing Agentic Boundaries**: Moving beyond chat and autocomplete to build AI agents that plan, reason, write, test, and ship code inside real development workflows.
- **Technical Scaling**: Building larger, more capable Frontier models and improving the training infrastructure (synthetic data, RL, reward functions).

## Why Work Here
- **Pioneering Work**: Build the future of autonomous software engineering at a company that leads the field in code-focused AI.
- **High Ownership**: Engineers own the full stack; work directly influences what the product becomes.
- **Culture**: Emphasizes direct communication, deep ownership, customer obsession, and “doing the hard thing.” Avoids performative overwork (standard 9-5, no regular late work or weekends).
- **In-Office by Design**: Primarily in-office (London) for close collaboration and fast feedback.
- **Benefits**: Competitive salaries, share options, pension (NEST), cycle-to-work scheme, weekly free meals, unlimited snacks/drinks, pet-friendly office, monthly team breakfasts/socials, quarterly offsites. Can request to work abroad up to one month per year.
- **Team**: Small (~23 people), high-agency, with deep technical talent.
- **Open Roles** (as of latest): ML Systems Engineer (Model Training & Infra), Full Stack Product Engineer, Strategy & Operations.

## Sources
1. [cosine.sh](https://cosine.sh/)
2. [cosine.sh/careers](https://cosine.sh/careers)
3. [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/cosine)
4. [LinkedIn](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/cosine-ai)
5. [Ashby Jobs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cosine)

## Other roles at Cosine

- [Founding Head of Public Sector](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-head-of-public-sector-cosine-london-1entpdng7w7s) — London, United Kingdom
- [Full Stack Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-product-engineer-cosine-london-ftwnedhnsvwb) — London, United Kingdom