Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Transformation

Join Team Tipalti in London, England, United Kingdom. We're looking for a Principal, AI Transformation to join AI Foundry (our internal team dedicated to making Tipalti AI-fluent through education, equipping, and end-to-end process redesign). You will serve as a key driver of Tipalti's AI-led operational transformation across General & Administrative functions — Legal, People, and Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) — working as a full-time embedded partner within their organizations.

Why join Tipalti? Tipalti is the AI-powered platform for finance automation, elevating how finance teams operate in the global economy. We empower our customers to scale faster and smarter by removing the complexities of doing global business and accelerating their finance operations efficiency. Our platform provides a comprehensive suite of finance automation solutions designed for mid-market businesses across accounts payable, global payouts, procurement, employee expenses, corporate cards, supplier management, tax compliance, and treasury.

In this role, you will:

• Understand the customer and identify gaps - Find the pain points within Legal, People, and Finance; learn the constraints they can’t change, the workarounds they’ve created, and find the problem that actually costs them time.
• Map and solve end-to-end workflows — Follow work across functions and systems to understand where the handoff failures are and where AI can create leverage across boundaries.
• Build and ship the fix yourself, fast. Prototype and deploy using approved LLMs (Claude and other AI tools), agent frameworks, MCP-based tooling, automation platforms, APIs, data integrations, and code, where code is the right answer.
• Follow Tipalti’s security, privacy, legal, compliance, architecture, and change-management requirements, including required approvals before production deployment.
• Know what we can build in-house — and be honest about what we can’t.
• Maintain a live, evidence-based view of what is buildable internally, both with code and without it, including what it takes to run and maintain.
• Your build-vs-buy guidance should address security, privacy, intellectual property, regulatory, data residency, vendor concentration, resilience, auditability, maintenance, and exit risks.
• Advise the Divisional Teams on their respective tech stacks (what we keep, consolidate, and retire).
• Design for reliability, not for the demo. Think in failure modes: where the model is wrong, how you’d know, what evaluation looks like, where meaningful human oversight belongs, and how sensitive data is handled.
• Define success, risk, control, and compliance metrics before you build.
• Track adoption, performance, control effectiveness, and incidents on a regular cadence.

About You

• You build things, hands‑on. You’ve shipped AI or automation solutions that real people depend on — agents, workflow automations, integrations, internal tools.
• You’re comfortable in a terminal, reading API documentation, and writing and debugging your own scripts (Python, TypeScript, or similar).
• You’ve felt the difference between “demo’d once” and “actually used.” Fluent with Claude.
• You can adapt quickly as approved tools change.
• You know what these systems are bad at, not only what they’re good at: non‑determinism, context limits, cost and latency, and when retrieval, tooling, or a plain script beats a model call.
• You trace work across functions and systems. You notice handoffs, redundancy, and instances where different parts of the org solve the same problem twice.
• You see inefficiency as a systems problem, not a function problem.
• Proactive and self‑directed. You find problems before they’re on your list.
• Comfortable at all levels of the org. You sit with frontline teams and actually understand their workflow.
• You’ll sit with engineers and translate business problems into technical specs.
• You turn vague asks into working solutions.
• You are genuinely interested in how these functions work, comfortable asking "stupid questions" to understand the actual workflow, and able to pick up domain language quickly.

Our Mission

Our mission is to elevate how finance teams operate in the global economy. We empower our customers to scale faster and smarter by removing the complexities of doing global business and accelerating their finance operations efficiency. We are the AI‑powered platform that automates finance.

Accommodations

Tipalti champions inclusive teams, in which every voice counts. We are committed to recruiting diverse candidates with varied personal experiences and abilities. We welcome applications from candidates belonging to historically underrepresented or disadvantaged groups, and maintain an equitable Talent Acquisition process that is free from discrimination.

AI Use

We may use artificial intelligence and automated systems (collectively "AI") to screen, assess, and select candidates during our recruitment process. This includes resume screening, skills assessment, and candidate matching. You have the right to request human review of any automated decision.

Privacy

We are committed to protecting the privacy interests of job applicants and candidates.