Director of Engineering, KYX Tide United Kingdom Engineering check more → in London

At Tide, we help SMEs save time and money in the running of their businesses by offering business accounts and related banking services, as well as a comprehensive set of highly usable and connected administrative solutions, from invoicing to accounting. Tide is transforming the small business banking market and now supports over 2 million members globally across the UK, India, Germany and France. Using advanced technology, all solutions are designed with SMEs in mind. With quick onboarding, low fees and innovative features, we thrive on making data-driven decisions to serve our mission: to help SMEs save time and money so they can get back to doing what they love.

Tide is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead the engineering organisation behind KYX (KYC and KYB). Our 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 we identify bad actors, stop them at the door, continuously review their activity and off-board 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. 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.

This is one of the most important engineering roles at Tide. You will shape how quickly and how well we onboard members, how confidently we scale into new markets under our own licences, and how far applied AI can compound into a lasting advantage in a regulated environment.

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.

Our location-specific employee benefits are designed to cater to the unique needs of Tideans:

• 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 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.

At Tide, we champion a flexible workplace model that supports both in-person and remote work to cater to the specific needs of our different teams. While remote work is supported, we believe in the power of face-to-face interactions to foster team spirit and collaboration. Our offices are designed as hubs for innovation and team-building, where we encourage regular in-person gatherings to foster a strong sense of community.

At Tide, we believe that we can only succeed if we let our differences enrich our culture. Our Tideans come from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. We celebrate diversity in our workforce as a cornerstone of our success. Our commitment to a broad spectrum of ideas and backgrounds is what enables us to build products that resonate with our members’ diverse needs and lives. We are One Team and foster a transparent and inclusive environment, where everyone’s voice is heard.