Lead AI Scientist

Soldo is the proactive spend management solution that frees progressive businesses to accomplish more.

Over 25,000 organisations across 31 countries use Soldo to end slow, messy, and inefficient spending, bringing financial agility and control over every expense. Soldo frees finance with a uniquely proactive approach to managing decentralised spending.

By combining a powerful spend management platform, a user-friendly app, and versatile payment methods, Soldo automates expense admin to eliminate inefficiency in managing business spending.

By proactively managing decentralised spend, organisations empower employees to spend when and where it's needed, keeping productivity high while avoiding month-end surprises.

Founded in 2015 by Italian digital innovator Carlo Gualandri, Soldo is headquartered in London, with offices in Dublin, Milan, and Rome.

We're looking for people with big ambitions, cool heads, sharp minds, and warm hearts. Come and join us as we grow together.

What's in it for you

• Competitive salary
• Private healthcare coverage for you and your family
• Lunch Vouchers
• Genuine career development opportunities (we love to see you succeed) - including your own annual €500 career development budget
• Access to training and development - including a mentoring programme, workshops and the opportunity to progress onto our leadership programme
• Flexible working options, including working from home or our Milan or Rome offices + 60 days' work anywhere
• Statutory Leave entitlements plus extra days off on Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and your Birthday
• Your own personal company Soldo card
• Employee Assistance Programme
• CAF Annual Fiscal & Financial Support

The role

We're now seeking a
Lead AI Scientist
to
build and lead our AI research and development function
, driving innovation that transforms how companies manage and optimise their spend.

As
Lead AI Scientist
, you will be both a
strategic architect
and a
hands-on innovator
, responsible for advancing Soldo's AI vision from concept to production.

You will grow and lead a team of AI scientists, machine learning engineers, and analysts in developing next-generation AI models that power real-time data enrichment, (near) real-time spend analytics, risk prediction, anomaly detection, and decision intelligence within our platform.

You will collaborate closely with Product, software architects, software engineering, and finance domain experts to ensure our AI systems deliver measurable business value while maintaining transparency, compliance, and ethical integrity.

Key Responsibilities

-Strategic Leadership

• Define and execute the company's AI roadmap aligned with the overall product and business strategy.
• Grow, lead, mentor, and scale an AI team and a multidisciplinary Squad, fostering innovation and technical excellence.
• Collaborate with executive leadership to identify and prioritise high-impact AI initiatives.
• Select the right tools, frameworks, and deployment strategies.
• Balance business goals with technical feasibility.

-Research & Development

• Design, architect/implement, and guide AI projects end-to-end, like for instance advanced machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI models for spend enrichment, spend categorisation, budget forecasting, fraud detection, and any kind of optimisation.
• Explore and prototype new AI technologies for product and financial behaviour modelling, NLP for invoice/document understanding, RAG for product enhancement and assistance, and reinforcement learning for spend optimisation.
• Ensure robust model governance, including explainability, fairness, and compliance with financial regulations (e.g., GDPR, ISO27001, SOC2).

-Operational Excellence

• Oversee deployment of AI systems into production with ML Ops best practices.
• Collaborate with data engineering to ensure scalable data pipelines and quality datasets.
• Monitor model performance, continuously iterate to improve accuracy and impact, and ensure drift detection, retraining pipelines, and robust documentation.

-Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product teams to translate customer problems into AI solutions.
• Communicate complex AI concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Represent the AI function in strategic discussions, product reviews, and relevant stakeholder communications.

We're looking for someone who must have

• PhD or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field.
• Extensive experience (typically 5+ years) in AI/ML research and development, including at least 2 years in a leadership role.
• Expertise in machine learning, NLP through LLMs, time-series forecasting, RAG, and anomaly detection.
• Strong programming skills in Python, and familiarity with frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Vector DBs, and LLMs.
• Deep understanding of data architecture, ML Ops, and cloud platforms (at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Proven experience designing scalable AI architectures integrated with production systems.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills; ability to inspire and guide technical teams.

It would be nice if you had

• Publications in applied AI research.
• Experience integrating AI into SaaS or enterprise B2B products
• Familiarity with generative AI for financial insights or automated reporting.
• Prompt engineering & fine-tuning
• Experience with transactional and payment data, expense categorisation, or financial document AI (OCR/NLP).