Description
About the Role:
Tide is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the engineering organisation behind KYX (KYC and KYB). The vision for KYX is a world where every genuine business, business owner, their team, and everyone connected to them, onboards to Tide in minutes, unlocks the products they need as they grow, and never has to think twice about their data, while identifying bad actors, stopping them at the door, continuously reviewing their activity, and off-boarding them the moment they're found.
You will be accountable for engineering strategy, organisation, and execution across three domains. Onboarding KYX covers identity and access for registration and login, due diligence policy execution and vendor orchestration across the onboarding journey, and the risk scoring and agentic AI that assesses new applicants. Continuous KYX covers ongoing due diligence through periodic and event-triggered reviews, and how business owners bring their own team members onto their account. Risk Scoring is the KYX Scoring & ML team whose models power decisions across both domains.
This role sits at the intersection of regulated risk operations, member-facing conversion, and applied AI. KYX Ops and KYX Policy set the rules you build for, Second Line of Defence sets the risk appetite, and regulators set the bar. We need someone who can raise onboarding conversion and due diligence quality while driving the cost of KYX servicing per member down, and who can scale agentic solutions into workflows where a wrong answer has consequences for a member and for Tide.
As Director of Engineering, KYX you will:
- Own the engineering strategy and organisation for KYX, from onboarding identity, access, and due diligence through continuous monitoring to risk scoring, unifying leadership that today sits in separate Onboarding and Continuous KYX lines.
- Lead engineering across backend, frontend, data science, and ML engineering, distributed across Hyderabad, Delhi, Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Vilnius.
- Own KYX Scoring & ML as a shared capability serving both onboarding and ongoing decisioning, including the model lifecycle end to end from development through backtesting and staged rollout to production monitoring.
- Scale agentic AI in regulated workflows, from onboarding risk scoring through to screening, review, and verification, in line with Tide's agentic governance framework.
- Work with KYX Ops, KYX Policy, Second Line of Defence, and Product across the UK, EU, and India, and with IAM on the still-to-be-sharpened boundary around login and access.
- Deliver measurable outcomes: higher automated decisioning rates, better due diligence and screening quality, and a falling KYX cost per member.
- Build once, deploy globally, and keep market-specific logic isolated.
What We Are Looking For:
- Experience leading engineering organisations in identity, onboarding, fraud, financial crime, or another regulated decisioning domain.
- Strong track record of turning platform investment into measurable outcomes: conversion, due diligence quality, unit economics, and workflow automation.
- Experience taking machine learning from development into production at scale, and owning model performance once live.
- Experience operating in a regulated environment, working with Ops, Policy, and second-line risk and compliance functions.
- Strong judgement across organisation design, delivery, platform strategy, data architecture, and technical quality.
- Ability to lead distributed teams across multiple markets and unify previously separate engineering lines behind one roadmap.
- Experience deploying AI or agentic systems inside regulated workflows, with a clear view on governance, evaluation, and human oversight, would be a bonus.
What You'll Get In Return:
- Competitive Compensation – Competitive salary and share options.
- Time Off – Generous annual leave on top of bank holidays.
- Parental Leave – Paid maternity, paternity, and adoption leave to support your family journey.
- Sabbatical – Extended unpaid and paid leave options after completing milestone years with Tide.
- Access to salary sacrifice benefits – like Nursery (could save up to 47% on fees!) and Cycle to Work discounts.
- Health Insurance – Comprehensive Private family insurance plan.
- Life & Accident Cover – Comprehensive accidental and life insurance protection.
- Mental Wellbeing – Access to therapy sessions, courses, meditations, and workshops.
- Retirement Planning – Build your retirement fund faster with Tide’s pension scheme on eligible earnings.
- Volunteering & Development Days – Paid days annually for volunteering or personal growth.
- Learning & Development – Annual budget for books, courses, coaching, and more.
- WOO (Work Outside the Office) – Work from abroad for up to 90 days annually.
- Home Office Setup – Contribution towards setting up your home office.
- Laptop Ownership – Keep your old laptop and get a new one when it’s time for a replacement.
- Snacks & Meals – Daily breakfast spread with all-day coffee, tea, and juices.