Founding Platform & Security Engineer in London

At Gradient Labs, we’re building an AI agent to redefine customer experience and operational efficiency in the financial services sector. Founded in 2023, we’ve quickly gone from an idea to a growing team with customers you know (and probably love). Our powerful AI agent is unique: it’s the only AI operations agent built specifically for financial services, handling even the trickiest, high-stakes customer queries safely and effectively. Crucially, it serves as one unified agent across the entirety of your customer operations, giving businesses the comprehensive visibility and control they need to trust all outcomes.

We’re a small but mighty team of builders from leading companies like Monzo, Pleo, and Google. If you’re excited to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and help shape the future of customer operations and experience, we’d love to hear from you.

We're looking for our Founding Platform & Security Engineer – a highly skilled and passionate individual to join our growing team. In this critical, greenfield role, you'll have significant ownership in shaping and securing our cutting-edge AI agent platform and underlying infrastructure from the ground up.

Reporting directly to the CTO, you'll lead the technical vision for Platform & Security, collaborating closely with AI, engineering and product teams to scale and safely deploy our platform across our and others’ cloud environments. This is an exciting opportunity to apply deep security expertise, particularly in the realm of AI, and build enterprise-grade security systems in a rapidly evolving environment.

• Scaling deployments: Take complete ownership of application, cloud, network, and AI agent scalability across our platform, and spearhead our journey to deploy our agent globally across multiple clouds.
• Architect & implement secure & effective platform tooling: Design and implement a comprehensive security framework covering customer-facing products, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and enterprise integration points, ensuring protection against both classic and modern, AI-enabled threats.
• Embed security in AI: Partner with our AI engineer teams to integrate security best practices into model training, evaluation and deployment processes, empowering our teams to innovate safely and responsibly.
• Automate & tool: Streamline security operations by integrating tooling into CI/CD pipelines, leveraging AI-based or next-gen solutions to automate scans, compliance checks, and infrastructure reviews.
• Continuously improve our security posture: Conduct regular audits of our cloud environment, perform penetration testing, and stay ahead of emerging AI security risks, recommending strategic security initiatives and leading efforts to establish best practices as the company scales.
• Speak with customers: Present and explain our security posture to enterprise clients, helping them understand how we secure their data, and addressing concerns around healthcare, financial, or other regulated data with clear, actionable insights and support compliance requirements.
• Incident response: Lead security incidents response, ensuring rapid resolution while maintaining service availability and minimizing impact.

• 5+ years of industry experience in security engineering, with a strong foundation in cloud platforms (AWS, or GCP), application and cloud security, and networking principles.
• Hands-on experience with production software (primarily in Go and Python), scripting, and DevOps tools for automation. Bonus if you have experience with Temporal as well.
• Familiar with secure coding practices, threat modeling, vulnerability scanning, and incident response processes.
• Strong knowledge of cloud security architecture, including VPC security, and enterprise-grade deployment patterns.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment, adaptable to changing priorities, and able to handle ambiguity with grace.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, able to clearly explain risk trade-offs and convey complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership and customers.
• Customer-first mindset and a passion for deeply understanding customer needs to find the right security solutions from first principles.

This is a unique chance to be part of a team working with cutting-edge technology to reshape how businesses will operate in the future. Over the next 10 years, every company will need to embrace AI-powered operations to stay competitive, and this role puts you right in the middle of that transformation.

You’ll tackle challenging and new problems, work with some of the most exciting brands across different industries, and be surrounded by a passionate, smart team that’s driven to build something groundbreaking.